Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Hits 300,000 Articles
Raul654 writes "Today Wikipedia reached the 300,000 article mark. Wikipedia is a 3-year-old non-profit project to build an encyclopedia using WikiWiki software. All text is licensed under the GFDL. It has everything that a traditional encyclopedia would, but also many things that would never get written about, such as Crushing by elephant and the GNU/Linux naming controversy. For size comparisons, the English Wikipedia has 90.1 million words across 300,000 articles, compared to Britannica's 55 million words across 85,000 articles. (All the languages combined together reach 790,000 articles.) For much of the first half of 2004, Wikipedia's growth has outstripped server capacity - however, the shortage of PHP/MySQL developers is probably the biggest long term problem facing the project. Slashdot had previously reported when Wikipedia reached the 200,000 mark."
should also have mentioned that Wikipedia has a whole article on Slashdot Subculture where n00bs like me cut our teeth. Plus The Economist mentions Wikipedia as a successful example of Open Source in this already slash-dotted article
My Favourite Meme
actually Wikipedia is busier than slashdot, according to Alexa.
And for good reason. (disclaimer: I am a Wikipedia contributor.) Also recommend Wikitravel.
Looks like they can use a few donations:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising
(tax deductable too!)
No they havent. Frequent shutdowns are there. The best way is to Make a donation. The amount of knowledge on Wikipedia dwarfs other encyclopedias.
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The 1911 Britannica, from which most of the articles you mention were "ripped," is in the public domain. And most of thos articles were used as starting points for people to work off, as intended. Knowledge has changed a bit since 1911 man.
Actually, there is a system in place to combat this potential problem. This page shows some of the recent instances of possible copyright infringement that will be fixed.
I personally was responsible for pointing out an entry that was copied wholesale from an author's (copyrighted) web page containing electronic versions of his work. I did so after I noticed some of the language was kind of suspect, and Googling some of the phrases found the copyrighted work.
With the massive amounts of traffic Wikipedia gets, and as a result more people like me reading the pages, this problem tends to fix itself rather quickly. The same goes for fears of massive vandalism -- it gets fixed very soon.
audioLibre - freedom of music
Please mod this up out of importance.
Please don't forget that Wikipedia is totally advertisement free and free information. In order to make this possible, you're donations are greatly needed. Please donate and help to keep this information free and available for all of us.
Longer term we're working on how to scale the databases (which of the many options to use). We're using three at the moment, one primary writes, one for slow queries and one for backup, the latter two both being replicating children. For data see:
For what we did with the previous donations from the start of the year see:
Our growth is pretty simple: when we're fast we grow to use all the capacity until we're slow again. Still no sign of us hitting the limit on demand, so it appears that we'd have no problem at all serving more people if we had another $50,000-100,000 to spend - there are ballpark growth estimates suggesting that we'd end up doing that by the end of the year if we could stay fast until then.
If anyone wants to donate, as one of the hardware people, I'd rather see monthly recurring payments of a smaller amount than a lump sum. It makes it easier for me to try to predict what we can buy based on some moderate predictability of available funds.
One common question: can we use commodity PCs as web servers? We'd like to but fitting them in the colo isn't currently practical. We're going for dual CPU 1U boxes as the next most cost-effective option for subsequent web server purchases. The Jan purchase was in part about getting enough boxes so we'd be able to switch them around to cover for failures, so those were cheaper per box 1U boxes. We've enough of those now, so it's CPU power/density time.
If anyone has any suggestions please feel free to drop comments on the talk page - we've a dozen or so people on the technical team and more input is always welcome, since we're after the most effective options we can find! Jamesday (author of much of the April planning document, one of the technical team members)
Yes, but Britannica's 85,000 articles are credible and verified for accuracy, while some of Wikipedia's content should be questionned.
;)
Verified by whom? As all generalisations, this one is also not true
When it comes to some controversial topics, Britannica gives usually only one theory, presented as a god-given truth. Sometimes it isn't even the most agreed upon theory among scientists of the relevant field.
I haven't used B. for a long time, since it started to charge for access. Last time I did, it showed ``Arian inviasion'' as the only theory of indo-european language apearing in India.
Wikipedia on the other hand shows other theories, even some very unorthodox ones from Indian nationalists. But it clearly states that ``Arian inviasion'' isn't highly regarded at least since the fifties.
Same goes for ``balto-slavic theory'', breaking of Enigma before WW2 etc
Go, look for yourself.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
So, the full encylopedia would currently fit on a CD, but only the most current versions of each page. Bear in mind that's just the database dump though. If you wanted to pre-render it to HTML you'd probably need a lot more space, so it'd be simpler to just ship MySQL and a decent local web server on the CD.
In the 1950-ties, some got the weird idea that epicycles were added on epicycles throughout the middle ages. This was based on some very bad early research that historians of 1910 may have been aware of, but did not find worthy of elaborate comment.
Britannica was the publication that really took this to its extreme, at some point they wrote that 40-80 epicycles were added per planet! Not only is it horrendously wrong, it is completely absurd: Nobody in the middle ages had neither observational capacity nor the mathematical methods to deal with anything like that.
Britannica is largely to blame that this myth could get into university curriculums world-wide as an example of "ad hoc hypothesis gone wrong".
If you have a good research library available look for articles by Owen Gingerich on Ptolemy for details on this. The facts is that Ptolemy's system was hardly modified at all.
It was moderated in the 1980-ties, and the most horrendous claims were removed. Around 1995, I still found the articles lacking, as the gist of the articles were that the addition of epicycles was a good example of "ad hoc hypothesis gone wrong", and I exchanged a few e-mails with the editors about it.
It has been a few years since I last checked these articles, but last time I checked, they still did not reflect general consensus among contemporary historians.
So, it is very much reason to question articles you read in Britannica as well, not only Wikipedia. The bottom line is that critical reading of any source is a vital survival skill.
Hm, I'm wondering what Wikipedia has to say about this... Unfortunately, I don't have any time to kill. What am I doing on /.? ;-)
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
hm...I learnt a lot about slashdot from wikipedia. particularly about the various arts of trolling on slashdot, the bad Russia/Natalie/BSD/Beowulf jokes and of course our good and sorely misssed friend goatse. I even found out about the anti-slash site, where the trolls gather to plot their strategy (Do your civic duty and um... visit this site).
:))
Here are some very informative links (no surprises, I promise
Slashdot
First posts and other trolls
Hall of fame
The coming of Evil
A History lesson
Slash and Burn
On the AC
More than just a discussion board
Our fearless leader
The best ways to help, without donating are:
Every article you contribute also adds to the wealth
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In regards to adverts, check out this e-mail by Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales (It's old but states his position)
"With the resignation of Larry, there is a much less pressing need for funds. Therefore, all plans to put advertising of any kind on the wikipedia is called off for now. We will move forward with plans for a nonprofit foundation to own wikipedia, and possibly to solicit donations and grants to help us carry out our mission. (Ironically, I think that grant money would come with many annoying strings attached, which we could not accept, comparted to advertising money, which is virtually 100% string-free.) Just as the National Geographic Society is supported in large part by advertisments in the National Geographic Magazine, I expect this to be a potentially necessary thing at some point in the future, if we wish to have an impact beyond our own little corner of the Internet. (And, I think we all do.) But for now, there's no pressing need unless and until we find chaos descending on us from the lack of constant oversight. The hosting of Wikipedia I can continue to do for no charge for the foreseeable future. Even if Wikipedia traffic were to grow by a factor of 10, I would be willing to absorb all the bandwidth and hardware costs. If it grows beyond a factor of 100 or 1000, obviously, alternative solutions would have to be found."
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
You can add Wikipedia to your search bar. Pretty convenient when you know it's going to be better than Google :).
You can find links to previous revisions through the history page for each article; this will remain available unless the article and its history is deleted, normally due to being full of nonsense and/or a copyright violation. For example, this is just the current revision of the /. article, whereas a version from February this year is here.
James F.