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."
Has Wikipedia resolved its funding crisis, or will they be once again facing a shortfall in the near future?
If I ever get the time I'd love to compile an easy to use CD/DVD containing an entire copy of the current WikiPedia. Then you could make copies and give them away free at Libraries and such.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Their article on the slashdot trolling phenomena
Scrame: Sunglasses are for assholes.
Crushing by elephant is fun, but what other dictionary has a huge article on worldwide contemporary pornography....
did you know: "Pornography in the United States tends to feature mostly blonde women with large breasts (usually augmented by breast implants) and buttocks and often with tattoos or body piercing. Men in pornography tend to be older and heavily muscled. American pornography movies often attempt to promote pornographic stars, and the boxes for video tapes tend to be extremely gaudy. Plot in pornographic movies is often minimal."
Its great to hava an encyclopedia you can quote from withoud worries of the BSA knoking down your door. There is ofcourse a slightly cheaper alternative. If you see EDB, dont panic!
as mentioned the previous milestone of 200,000 articles was also talked about on slashdot aswell, and to me the interesting thing is the date, Mon Feb 02, in other words , 100,000 "articles" in 6 months,
;)
(if my math is any good) thats over 550 articles per day and that number can only increase as more and more people find out about it (thus begin to contribute yet more articles on a regular basis).
Just goes to show how much we can get done when we work together on projects such as this.
BTW you can always chat with the brains behind the operation if you have any questions or comments, at irc.freenode.net #wikipedia
to my friends at wikipedia i would just like to say, "Keep up the good work"
Since anybody can apparently edit an unprotected article, what would stop someone submitting copyrighted material in an update(which surely wouldn't be permitted to be licensed under the GFDL as Wikipedias content supposedly is)? I realise this can be a potential problem in all software, but it seems that it could be a far bigger problem for Wikipedia, particularly if someone else took content assuming it was licensed under the GFDL.
Combined live stats, all wikimedia servers.
Wikipedia needs donations to stay alive.
considering the rate of growth for wikipedia and the fact that it is edited by the very people who use it (as well as some very dedicated full time (unpaid "editors") i would say they are doing a pretty decent job of verification of facts, the cool thing is that as you are browsing the articles if you see something that you think is inaccurate you can say so right on the page itself (or on the comment page that is attached to each and every article on the site) I dont seee bribannica doing anything similar to that.
the difference is an Open Source, free (and free)(tm) reference that you can contribute to as a user, as compared to Closed Source (propriotary) copyright protected, expensive, reference who is written by a company who may or may not have a point of view to push of their own.
given the choices i would rather consider the Open Alternative as more credible considering any person ON EARTH who has knowledge on the subject is welcome to contribute to any given respective article, rather than put my faith in some Large company to get the "facts" strait on their own. but that is just me.
Not true. Britannica's articles are probably checked by a handful of editors. Wikipedia's articles can be (and some are) checked over by hundreds and theoretically an infinite number of people.
My browser's default page is set to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage
This shows a random Wikipedia page each time I open a new browser window. Often you can read about very interesting things.
My site
I guess IPv6 will eventually solve the biggest problem for such sites which is bandwidth. You just collect requests of the same page for a short time then broadcast the message with all the receivers IP nr. in the header.
Slashdotting would then be a good thing as requests for the same page would come at the same time and you can server thousands with just dozens of actual pages being broadcast.
Now if only all IPv4 providers would have IPv6 drop in points even the backbone would not see any increase if some static page is requested by many many users.
Browsers should get some smart caching though 'sorry this is just a small site, requests for downloading my page / shareware will be broadcast on the hour'. Everybody could serve!
Dennis SCP
Hrm. Excuse my newbishness, but would this thing fit on a DVD / set of DVD's easily? Would there be any problems collating it off the servers? It would kinda be cool to have the ability to browse this offline, and I could give copies to friends so that they don't waste their money on Encarta. It could also allow them to make a bit of a profit to get funds up. :-D
For each article, there are usually several people watching the edits by others and this is just increasing with time. Acts of vandalism even the subtle ones usually gets corrected quite fast. Vandals have no big motivation, they give up quickly. Watchers on the other hand are dogged.
This is one of the hidden beauty of Wikipedia.
This project (COSTP/Wikibooks) invites anyone who is expert in World History to contribute. It's an important project because it will prove that a bona fide K-12 textbook *can* be created in open source - and most importantly, gain approval for use by the State Board of education, we would then be able to crack the costly commercial textbook business at the K-12 level.
COSTP has shown that you can have a *printed* textbook come out of open source at a 50% savings over commercial textbooks. California alone spends almost $400M for K-12 textbook in one year. Imagine how much $200M in savings would help California's money-strapped schools. Further, once other states get into the open content idea, many *billions* in savings could be realized.
It's very important that content contributors be willing to maintain strict adherence to the California State Education department Standards. This is the *only* way that a book like this will pass State Board of Education approval. if COSTP can get a few of these in the system, it will eventually open up for alternative histories, and other curriculum areas. Lastly, COSTP is devoted to bringing *printed* textbooks to the K-12 sector, worldwide, by spreading the meme that open content - created by knowledgeable peers, and based on local curriculum standards - can and should be used for basic education
That's actually part of the fun of the Wikipedia. Not that the content should be questioned, but that it is, over and over again, by anyone willing to put the time in to participate. This may degrade the accuracy of the content in some ways, but it also gives the content an eternally organic quality that is perhaps more realistic than traditional encyclopedia. Real vandalism and overt factual error seems to be noticed and removed relatively quickly, and you can always look at the history of an entry if it has been recently vandalized. Questions about point of view tend to be more difficult, but what is amazing is the open and public attempt to negotiate and resolve those questions on the "discussion" page for each entry. Much of the discussion emphasizes the need for a "neutral point of view" -- a perspective most users agree is ultimately unattainable. And those discussions are archived. In a way it is superior to having a peer-reviewed final product that says what the encyclopedia referees decide the truth is -- instead you have an eternally in-process project at discovering the truth in an ongoing manner (and continuing to re-discover it). Of course you can't rely on an entry being accurate at any given time, but if you want to you can look at the history of an entry's revision and discussion to learn more, to read what might have been deleted, discover alternative points of view or pieces of information that were later removed, etc. It's a much more accurate depiction of "knowledge" than a normal (closed) encyclopedia, which pretends that the accumulation of knowledge is a completed project.
Wikipedia scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two ways: first, it is slightly cheaper, and second, it has the words 'Welcome to Wikipedia' printed in large friendly letters on the cover.
Moreover, where Britannica will give a biochemical description of alcohol, Wikipedia will tell you what the best drink in existence is, where the best ones are mixed, how much you can expect to pay and what voluntary organisations exist to help you rehabilitate afterwards. Oh, and even how to make one yourself.
Seriously, though: take a clamshell PDA, a wireless connection and set Wikipedia to be your homepage, and write 'Don't Panic' on the cover. Another SF fantasy becomes real...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I had read about Jihad before although more in the historical context. The information presented by the Wikipedia entry seems fairly decent even though I think there is still plenty left to nitpick.
I only took Jihad as an example because it is a fairly charged word which may easily provoke emotional response. My concern with Wikipedia is that the definitions of words about which entrants have strong feelings will not be entirely balanced.
When you look at the RAM usage statistics of their servers, for instance for brown, you find a clear sawtooth pattern, showing a linear increase in memory usage until the server (or a service) is restarted.
There are better inter-user communication facilities, and a heightened sense of community, but that comes at a cost, namely the fact that it's a lot harder to incorporate ones self into the node-gel then into a series of wiki prefixes.
Also, Wikipedia has many more features than Everything2.
A much more enlightened place to be? Well, not really. I was an early user of Everything2; while I could be a troll and list a series of reasons why E2 sucks, i'd rather just invite everyone who is interested in both to take the pepsi challenge. Try both.
Can be, yes. But are they? And do the people checking them over actually have the knowledge to do so properly? At least with Britannica I can be fairly confident that the article was written by an expert in the field. With Wikipedia it may well have been written by some guy with spare time on his hands, enthusiasm, but not much knowledge. Or worse, it may have been written by an expert and then "corrected" by Jo Schmo.
As someone with a doctorate dealing with genomic evolution in microorganisms, I have to say that at least the scientific articles in Wikipedia seem to be reasonably balanced and competently written -- and reasonably up-to-date as well.
Quite often in commercial encyclopedias the articles are quite biased and out-of-date because they are written by a single, well known old guy in the appropriate field, and as Max Planck said, a new idea in science doesn't generally win by converting its opponents -- rather the old opponents die and the new scientific generation is comfortable with the new idea from the start...
Wikipedia has some great information, but there are too many pages that are simply direct imports from the US census showing every tiny town in the US.
Makes browsing with Random hard when you keep on getting statistics and nothing else on endless lists of towns.
I've not spent much time reading Everything2, but I've never been as impressed by its authority as I have by wikipedia.
For instance, compare the Everything2 page on Water (I can't link to it, for some reason the site uses HTTP POST for identifying which article you want) to the the wikepedia one.
I find the wikipedia article much more clearly structured, more informative, and I think more authoratitive. Although only the Everything2 article contains an ASCII-art rendering of the Kanji character for water.
Just a couple of incorrect things we've found in Britannica over the years: Making Fun of Britannica
What about placing GoogleAds in every page?
The small little boxes of text ads could endup being also informative, and add contents instead of subtracting space to it; and they have minimal bandwidth hit.
With 300.000 pages of definitions, and many many visitors every day, I think this could generate quite a lot of free $.
N.B. Note that I don't know the inner workings of the Wikipedia projects very well, so maybe there are some idelogical rules that deny this possibility. Sorry in advance for that, if that's the case.
Bye!
SeqBox
... I only discovered it a few months ago, and what really struck me was not only was the quality quite high, but the technology itself. The wiki concept is rather striking.
:-)
So then I got to thinking, what if instead of using wikis to have a homepage, or an encyclopedia or a text book - a site recording fact - if you had something recording ideas and thoughts.
You know, you come up with ideas for say coding projects, or even just things that should be made and you know you're not going to do anything with them, and you want to let them form into something more with other people. So you go to sites like ShouldExist.org and bandy them around.
But what if you did it as a wiki? And you didn't restrict it to your software todo lists? And what if you could write fiction there and hold debates? And you know, muck about with other people's idea and perhaps form them into something that could happen?
So a few weeks ago, I got hold of Mediawiki, the software used by Wikipedia, and setup VagueWare.com. And it's starting to work. It's good fun. Open source think tank. A kind of a "Bazaar" in the ESR sense for thoughts and ideas.
So for me, the best thing about wikipedia is not the 300,000 articles, all of them quite good, but it's the software underneath it. It's allowed me and my friends to build a big playpen that anybody can join in with.
So, well done for 300,000 articles, but most of all, thanks for the best wiki software on the planet. My life would be worse off without it.
I suppose that if you assume people are fair, no one has an agenda and people basically know everything more or less accurately then Wiki is fine. Problem is that none of that is true.
We live in the Post Editorial Age whereby any nugglet of infotainment is accepted as truth and fact and no one need rely on fact checkers, editors or referees that ensure that revisionism doesn't take precident over truth. So if I round up 10,000 of my closest net friends and I convince them to agree to say that say something then it pretty much becomes fact.
Eventually the internet will be a weapon for tyranny.
Ironically, this genius probably thinks that he's making a statement for tolerance, open-mindedness and understanding.
Anyway.
A few years ago, one of the Wikipedia heads posted a rather pompous writeup to Kuro5hin, asking in the faux-question style we frequently see in Ask Slashdots, "How can the Wikipedia system work? Why isn't it full of crap?" In fact, at the time it was almost entirely full of crap and I told him so. He responded graciously, telling me to check back in a few years.
A few years later, they've really done a terrific, terrific job, and I want to tell them that, also!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Eventually the internet will be a weapon for tyranny.
Too late...
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Lois, this isn't my Batman glass. - Peter
I agree with your thinking. This also applies to subject matters pertaining to the humanities.
For example, as a Canadian I am deeply interested in the War of 1812 and its effects on the formation of my country. The latest Wikipedia article on the subject contains a much more balanced perspective on the war than most other 'summary' accounts, and represents new thinking/interpretation of the war that is coming into vogue over the past decade or so.
At this point I have a much greater degree of respect for the Wikipedia than i do for 'dead tree' accounts. The oraganic, evolving nature of the content is a much more representative to the nature of intellectual discourse, debate, and socratic thinking IMHO.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Haven't really used wikipedia but I was able to edit the crushing by elephant article by clicking on "edit this page", isn't there any security on this site? how does it garuntee the correctness of the articles?
2 wrongs dont make a right - but 3 lefts do
The finance articles are also accurate and remain on the cutting edge of financial (quant) techniques. There isn't as much contriversy there, I've not yet delved into some of the more political economics articles (externalities, supply side theories, Ricardian tax policies etc). From what I have seen all were written by some very sharp folks.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
The idea behind wikipedia is cool, but just by skimming one entry I have seen two factual mistakes. One is probably just a mistake (which i tried to correct but it remains the same a month later) but the other one seems like someone has an ax to grind and is actually putting in false information that they wish were true.
In the Puerto Rico entry it says that Puerto Ricans dont pay federal taxes, that is simply not true. There is no separate federal taxation category for Puerto Ricans. What is true is that income earned in puerto rico by pays no federal taxes.
The entry also says that only 20% of puerto ricans decend from blacks which is a lie. Immigration from europe and slaves brough from africa accounted for almost 100% of the population and it was about 50-50 white and black. The article instead says that 60% of the population can claim amerindian descent. THat is bullshit. the indians in puerto rico were killed in practically less than a generation. that is why they started bringing black slave in the first place.
You're an idiot. You have no idea who has reviewed the Wikipedia articles so you assume that there were no profs or anyone qualified reviewing it. You have also assumed that all Britannica's articles are checked over by profs "and such". You have no idea this is the case, and the reality is, you have no way of knowing if it was checked over or not. On Wikipedia you can check the History and see who wrote a lot of it.
I don't have a lot of time, but I do have MySQL/PHP skills, and I might be able to help with some bug fixes, etc. I suppose I should join before I bother to write this, but oh well. What I want is an email address for someone so I can tell them what I am willing to do (shit work).
BTW, I usually hate shit work, but I'm willing to spend some time lending a hand with WikiPedia. I spend all day thinking hard (chip design), and so for this, simply because I have the skill set, I'm willing to do some things thta don't require as much thought.
This whole thread is completely degenerating into speculation and useless theorizing. To be more concrete, I've read dozens of articles on wikipedia and have yet to read anything Just Plain Wrong or trollishly biased. Yes, I hear you say, you're just a random slashdot reader who probably doesn't know anything anyway. I challenge YOU to find anything blatently false or biased on wikipedia. To make it fair, lets rule out anything that has been there less than 24 hours (and so hasn't had much time for review). Post links here. Go on.
Wiki tends to produce a more encyclopedia-like database, because there is a single article per page. E2 is a harder read because there are multiple writeups per node. It's also kind of a drag that you can't use images on E2 but I think that it enforces a kind of informational purity. It doesn't make the content any more correct, but if you care about the quality of your writeups, you end up being forced to give complete descriptions. There is no relying on "see picture below". You can draw some ASCII art but it's of only limited use for diagrams. (See for example my writeup on double wishbone suspension.) Actually, I do consider the lack of images to be E2's single greatest failing, because ascii art actually makes the page less readable on small devices and in text browsers.
Regardless, I have chosen E2 because I want my writeups to exist as independent entities. I don't want some choad overwriting my changes, even if they are right and I am wrong. I want them to notify me of my error, and then I want to change it, because I want to learn from it.
Personally I think the solution is to play the two sites off one another. E2 has a lot of great content. Wikipedia has the most immediately useful content. The two go together like peanut butter and strawberry jam.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Dumb question: why are the units on the left side of the graph backwards?
Essentially, whatever your supposed need to have the "product" of an "expert reviewed" free encyclopaedia, you are essentially proposing what can be thought of as immoral slacking in your reply to my reply -- by proposing the primacy of your desire to be a "user" with rights to free stuff and not the need to also be a "citizen" with obligations to help with quality and quantity of free stuff. So, you appear to claim rights without responsibilities. That is just not a defensible moral position (obviously it might be defensible, say, militarily for a time, if you can use the threat of force to get people to work for you for free as slaves). The net needs more "citizens" (or netizens) and less "users", IMHO. Look at, say, James P. Hogan's sci-fi novel _Voyage From Yesteryear_ to see the difference in attitude and what it means for humanity. Or, look at the culture of some of the Native People of the Americas who believed in universal abundance and a gift economy (before Western militarism and bioterorrism and corporatism took its toll).
To soften this criticism, I'll say I am guilty of it too sometimes -- I haven't added anything to Wikipedia though I use it sometimes (although I have occasionally been thinking about how to make it peer to peer). You or the original poster may well make wonderful contributions to other projects like FreeBSD and have a fair argument to expect high quality in others free work in exchange for yours.
Another deeper point is that the notion of an "encyclopedia" is to an extent a farce anyway -- it is just a sampling of all human knowledge and experience based on what the editors given their own biases could pay for and fit into a few dozen printed volumes. Wikipedia is one example of something so much greater. Beyond some basics, and even there sometimes, "accurate information" is a very subjective and problematical concept, at the very least because all information is subject to interpretation and context and selection (e.g. will an article on "red shift" discuss Halton Arp?), whereas collaboration is almost universally a good thing. A lot of experts have econmic reasons to give out poor answers and not challenge the academic status-quo and related dogmas. See for example Kicking the Sacred Cow: Questioning the Unquestionable and Thinking the Impermissible. He makes the point that engineering (like a bridge) ultimately works to fill a need or doesn't -- but science itself (or expert opinion) can end up becoming self-perpetuating dogma.
We may just have to agree to disagree here. Also, a better overall net system (or Google) woudl make it easy to find the original poster's criticism of the Puerto Rico article, making this argument moot as the new information might in the future be integrated by the original act of posting the ciriticism on a web site like Slashdot.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.