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."
So this isn't very informative but I just wanted to say how much I like Wikipedia. I've used it countless times and I consider it an invaluable resources. I only wish more people knew about it. :)
"Today Wikipedia reached the 300,000 article mark"
Whohoooo! Let's celebrate by slashdotting the site!
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
Has Wikipedia resolved its funding crisis, or will they be once again facing a shortfall in the near future?
I'd also like to congratulate Slashdot on their 113692th article...
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.
Yes, but Britannica's 85,000 articles are credible and verified for accuracy, while some of Wikipedia's content should be questionned.
Wikipedia is still my favorite surfing destination to kill time.
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
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
And I'm proud to say I contributed to the goatse.cx article.
May his memory live on.
Buckethead
Definitely, the new look Wikipedia is wonderful to use.The latest news, the selected aniversaries and the did u know section were nice features thought by the folks there. Also the browse by section can be very handy. I have found Wikipedia's explaination on a wide range of topics very useful. It goes on to show how an open collaboration model can be made to produce wonderful results. And congratulations to the people at Wikipedia for achieving this landmark. I hope this prompts more people to contribute.
I miss my stack of 38 dusty encyclopedias my father forced me to use when I asked him a question back in gradeschool. That's where you score REAL knowledge. According to wikipedia, we've sinced landed on the MOON? Umm, I think not. Back to the books I think for some legitimate fact checking.
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
Their article on the slashdot trolling phenomena
Scrame: Sunglasses are for assholes.
...not having that damn annoying Encyclopedia Britannica kid around.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
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
Remember that old advice about how you can understand how (in)accurate the media really is? Find a subject you know very well, and see how many mistakes they make when they cover it. When you realize that the media makes mistakes of that same magnitude on virtually every story they cover, not just on the stories in your topic... well, it's an eye opener.
Wikipedia, from that standpoint, is at the opposite end of the spectrum from traditional, commercial journalism. Its authors have all the time in the world to get things right, check facts, correct bad wording, improve clarity. The quality of the entries is generally astounding. And if anything is wrong with an entry, we readers can become writers and correct it ourselves! Very nice. Thanks, fellow Wikipedia contributors!
Looks like they can use a few donations:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising
(tax deductable too!)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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
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.
I had a quick read of that article and the two sides can be summarised as: GNU/Linux: "Credit where credit is due please" and "Linux is inaccurately applied". Linux: "It's the term commonly used therefore we shouldn't change it". Have to admit Linus' quote did make him appear a right little shit.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
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
What's that sound? It's hundreds of responsible wikipedians clicking `revert' to hold back the flood of slashdot trolls.
-Colin
Actually, there has been an interview years ago (/. seems to be an early adopter :))
here is the announcement and here's the interview.
Well, It could be time for an update on what has happened within the last three years.
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.
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.
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 Hits 300,000 Articles" is not accurate.
There is no doubt about that the English edition of wikipedia (which is the largest one by a huge margin) has reached 300K articles yesterday as the result of a great collaborative effort.
However, Wikipedia reached 300K articles a while ago and the text itself is correct to take not that all languages put together are now around 800K more or less.
Most communication is done in English, sure but I consider the fact that wikipedia is an international, multilingual project much higher than this single number.
We might see a point in the future where other languages might catch up regarding the size (or quality) of the English one. I would not be surprised to see a language like Hindi or Mandarin gaining speed sooner or later.
In celebration of this momentous occasion, I suggest that all slashdot posts be formatted in the wiki style.
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)
A much more enlightened and pleasant place to be.
Oh yes, and we have the EDB.
I think that the Wikipedia is the single most remarkable book ever to emerge from the Internet. Though, given the way it's written, it can only be expected to contain much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I think Wikipedia is a great source for internet history. Like when searching for Serdar Argic the horrendous Turkish usenet troll, Wikipedia was one of the best sources for info. The All Your Base entry is a useful entry as well. This is Wikipedia's great niche in my opinion; internet history and trivia.
But... for anything else, it is of limited value. Just look at the discussions for the entries. They are loaded with talk of "neutral viewpoint". WTF, does this mean?
So if one contributer feels 2+2=4
and another feels 2+2=6
So then according to the "neutral viewpoint" on the issue, the entry should be 2+2=5. "Neutral viewpoint" is just meaningless jargon, what matters is being accurate, knowledgeable and correct, not establishing some phantom neutrality.
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.
Wikipedia will be its primary data base and starting point for universal understanding. Unfortunately it will go on to encounter /. and learn of the deleterious effects of a steady diet of drugs and pr0n. Slashdotters in return will discover the sentient being and /. its underlying Beowulf cluster turing it to slag destroying the logos life form
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
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.
The best ways to help, without donating are:
Every article you contribute also adds to the wealth
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
...or at least that I haven't found, is the option to link to one specific version of an entry. Have it auto-add some banner on top "This is the entry as of dd.mm.yyyy hh:mm, click HERE to go to the current version".
Why? Because it's always annoying to link to some article there, only to bring a hoard of trolls down on them. Yes, the page is reverted fast as well but there's nothing like trying to make a serious link only to have it replaced by goatse ASCII art.
I don't mean that should be used for long-term links. But it'd be very nice to be able to link to a "good" version of a page in say, a slashdot comment valid for a couple hours. For one, you can put it in a static page cache, reducing load in case of slashdotting-like crowds following it.
It is also a better experience for those following the link to read, and you're one step away from the current version (which is unlikely to have changed in that short timespan) should you wish to edit/add to it, without making the current page attractive to trolls.
Hell, you could even make these links "expire" if you want, redirecting to the current version instead. That way, you don't have links pointing to age-old versions. Just give it a reasonable timeframe and it'll be a much more attractive link target for articles in "serious" publications as well. Just my 0.02 NOK.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
... 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.
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 :).
that i never noticed the Wikipedia before until today when i recognized the little puzzle globe on the left of the page.
Many of my searches on google would end up there but I never payed much attention to the site itself, since i was focusing on the subject i was looking for...
good to know that Wikipedia has helped me before even though i never actually asked for its help in particular, this shows how efficient it really is since many of its resources are available through other search engines.
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
"There is nearly nothing in the way of verification on Wikipedia."
:), can really quite anal if they think someone is being blantly false.
Are you joking?
First of all, people may not be generally smart but usually people are smart, very smart, at least one thing and usually it is because it is a topic they are interested in. Such people navigate to their topic of interest on Wikipedia and can can see easily if there are any factual problems. Second, there is nothing illegal about cross referencing a wikipedia article with other sources or encyclopedias to *verify* the facts - The only no-no is copying material directly. Third, there are many 'professionals', professors and other university graduates, who also contribute. There are probably more voulinteering for wikipedia then the total number working at other encyclopedias.
Plus if you think there are any factual errors you raise the point in the article discussion page, and within hours the issue probably has been reviewed by dozens of people. Believe me, from experience, if someone puts in nonsense or nonfactual information into an article people immediately engage discussion on the point. People, including me
Wil's site is WilWheaton.net. The shock site is WilWheaton.org.
Yeah, right.
I discovered the power of wikipedia last nite when I did a search for John Edwards History (always good to know a little background on your politicians) yesterday after it was announced by the Kerry camp. The Edwards page was already updated reflecting the vice presidential nomination. The information it provided I felt gave me a very clear, non-partisian view of the man and who he is.
Their FAQ is very thorough as well, and has some great resources for editing/creating pages and stubs.
They already have!
:-)
Not exactly, this article specifies that the Asian elephant can weigh up to 7500 kg. Although exceptional, 8 tons does not sound impossible. And African elephants tend to top out at 12000 kg (biggest elephant shot, Angola 1974), not 4000 as you said.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
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.
My father's encyclopedia described Uranium as "a useless white metal."
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.
His point is that false information was being presented as true. While it certainly can be corrected, that doesn't make little Emily's fifth grade report on Puerto Rico any more accurate.
People use encyclopedias so they can look up accurate information. They don't want to be forced into the role of reviewer and editor.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Thanks for your feedback :-)
Yes, we are planning to make it possible for people to have a small amounts automatically debited once a month.
So that would make you... a pediaphile?
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.
Sorry, I didn't address the database part of your comment. The site often is database-bound. The current high web server load will just move the slowest point to the database, the number of visits will go up and we'll see where the next pressure point is. Today we were sufficiently database-bound that we temporarily turned off local search and used Google instead for a while.
At the moment:
One Squid cache server loss hurts responsiveness, so we'll be getting at least one more so we can stand one failure there. For two months of growth that probably means at least two to keep up.
At least several web servers are needed to remove them as a choke point for a while (my guess is that five or so dual Opterons will handle traffic growth here for two months or so).
More database servers are needed and more load spreading between them. The load balancing work is ongoing. Since there are differences about how to handle this (how to spread the load) I'll abstain from describing possible options here until there's more general agreement. Will certainly involve slaves offloading some queries and slaves offloading search from one or more primary servers.
There's no sign yet that the growth is growing (we're in a seasonal relatively low load period at the moment though) and that means that we'll continue to see stress points moving around.