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?
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.
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And I'm proud to say I contributed to the goatse.cx article.
May his memory live on.
Buckethead
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.
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!
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!)
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.
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.
"So this isn't very informative but I just wanted to say how much I like Wikipedia."
Aparantly, the moderators disagree with you and mods you informative. Or rather, they agree with you and mod you... Or, they... agree, I mean disagree... with... or... AAAARGH! I sprained my brain!
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
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
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)
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.
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
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.
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
And what, traditional encyclopedia's are going to be more entirely balanced?
You've got a much better chance of getting a well-vetted response on Wikipedia than anywhere else I know of...
Every piece of communication is biased, but I would worry much less in the Wikipedia than in a traditional closed encyclopedia for a couple of reasons:
In other words, many authors make for more balanced articles, the same way that many eyes make for more robust software.
There is also a large core of volunteer editors who copyedit new submissions and remove vandalism -- yesterday, some of my new articles were edited (up to professional standards) within minutes of my posting them, and then improved with additional links and information.
...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.
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 :).