Exactly right - the media take up BY FAR the largest amount of space. Being that I do a lot of work putting full length songs onto Wikipedia (and I'm pretty much the only one who does), I've put well over 2 gigabytes onto commons in the last 6 weeks alone. See the list of songs I've put up:)
I wonder... does this 2-DVD set include all articles from Wikipedia?
Well, since it doesn't exist yet, there's no answer to this. But as far as what *might* happen, mediawiki 1.5 will containg a versioning system that will eventually be used to mark 'good' versions of an article, which can them be used to generate a DVD/printed version. On the other hand, it'll be a couple of months before it is deployed, then add another 2 weeks for bug fixes, and at the same time, we wikipedia users have to figure out how the community should actually employ it (e.g., who-does-what with it). This means that the DVD will probably be ready long before the versioning is, and as such, I suspect it's going to be a raw database dump.
Mediawiki 1.5 (which should be out soon - a couple of months, probably) will include a versioning system. Someone can mark a version as 'good', which in theory means no vandalism and no POV (point of view) issues. (who this is has not yet been determined - I suspect it will probably an admin)
I first heard about this back in July of 2004. The people at Mandrake had already approached some of our people, and told us they wanted to put Wikipedia on DVD. The stumbling block was, of course, copyright issues. We launched a copyright tagging project in August - basically, they did an sql dump of the list of all uploaded files that had no copyright tag and tagged them. In January, Angela sent them an email, telling them it was done, and that's when the DVD project actually started.
About 4 years ago, I was touring the US National Supercomputing Center in San Diego. One of the supercomputers had a clear plexiglass side where you could see inside, and it had running water and even a waterfall. Mind you, this 'water' was running directly over the electronic components. So the guy doing the tour said that it wasn't really water, but a chemical compound similiar to water, but very nonconductive. He tells us that it costs $10,000 per barrel, and that he always gets questions about what happens if you drink it. "Well, we're not sure what happens if you drink it, but we figure one of two things will happen. It could be toxic, and you drink it and die. Or, it could be nontoxic, and when our finicial guys found out you were drinking their $10,000-a-barrell water, they'll kill you."
I can beat this by a mile. A friend-of-a-friend of mine got busted for changing 3 of her failing grades to A's. How? All the grades are filed electronically. She guessed one professor's password; two other times, she called up campus IT services, claimed to be a professor so-and-so, claimed she should log in, and could they change the password for her? And IT services happily went along. She was busted for (among other things) federal identity theft, which always struck me as odd since it never crossed state lines.
I had the great pleasure of showing that video to David Gerard, the principal author of Heavy Metal Umlaut. He was floored, and thought it was the greatest thing he ever saw:)
Another Wikipedian, a developer with Yahoo India, mentioned this on the Wikipedia village pump last night. Being that I handle the full-length music uploads almost single-handedly (you can see my progress here) I went and eagerly tried it out. The result was very disappointing. I searched for about 20 different songs on my wishlist (at the bottom of my user page. Most of the hits were mutopia MIDIs or bizticket e-donkey links --- eg, useless. So I search for the songs + (Ogg OR mp3). The only useful hits were to the Internet Archive and to the MIT free music site, both of which I have thoroughly plundered. So like I said, this was a sizeable letdown.
In the last year, I've had several incidents where I needed to access old articles from the Nature, the ACM, and IEEE. (old = 2, 4, and 33 years old respectively). Let me tell you, there is NOTHING more infuriating than not being able to access these when you need them. Bugmenot helps some, but not always.
...before I put Xenu as Wikipedia's daily featured article, I made damn sure to get Jimbo's permission (in the year+ I have been choosing the main page featured articles, the only other time I asked his permission before running a featured article was before putting up Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Good thing I asked too, because 2 days later, we were blocked in China (for a second time))
When I saw this story, I immediately thought of that simpsons episode where Homer has the internet startup, and Bill Gates tells his two goons to "Buy him out, boys"
Just to be picky - he didn't say they out to be chopped off, he said something to the effect that if the top 10 stories were chopped off, the UN wouldn't be any different. He didn't advocate chopping them off, he was pointing out that the UN has a huge bureacracy, which is true afterall (Remember, this is the same organization that added Sudan to the select human rights commission *while* it was committing genocide in Darfur) On the other hand, appointing him was another in the Bush administration's long line of diplomatic fuck ups.
You do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when using it.
Bullshit. You can't dictate where people have a right to privacy, because the law says that if enough people think that a particular medium is private, it (legally) is, and you need a wiretap order to access it. And I'd bet the vast majority of people who use these services believe their conversations should be private.
Wikipedia is a non-profit website, run by volunteers, and we're our traffic double every quarter or two. Being slow is a natural consequence of this. The bottleneck is not bandwidth (of which we have plenty, for now), but servers. Also, please point out a single other non-profit in the alexa top 100 - you won't find any.
You might find the Developer's blog an interesting read. Also, Jamesday (our chief sysadmin) tells me that the 10 servers they ordered in January should be up and running by the end of the month.
Derek programmed a bot to do this with US census data, but there are some users who are doing this manually for cities in other countries. Yeesh:)
Also, (and I talked with him about this when I met him in person) it's going to be interesting to see what happens in 2010 when the next census data comes out.
Some article inherently attract users who push a certain point of view (called POV pushers), which goes against Wikipedia's core principle that our articles should have a neutral tone and point of view (called our NPOV policy). Thankfully, most of these articles are high visibility, so POV pushers tend to be vastly outnumbered on these topics, and quickly grow disillusioned.
That's coming down the pike. Although things are fairly nebulous at this point, within the next year, we expect to have a system with 2 versons - an "approved" (e.g., vandalism free) version and a live version, but implimentation details are still undecided.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly right - the media take up BY FAR the largest amount of space. Being that I do a lot of work putting full length songs onto Wikipedia (and I'm pretty much the only one who does), I've put well over 2 gigabytes onto commons in the last 6 weeks alone. See the list of songs I've put up :)
I know this is a joke, but I answered this elsewhere on this thread.
I wonder... does this 2-DVD set include all articles from Wikipedia?
Well, since it doesn't exist yet, there's no answer to this. But as far as what *might* happen, mediawiki 1.5 will containg a versioning system that will eventually be used to mark 'good' versions of an article, which can them be used to generate a DVD/printed version. On the other hand, it'll be a couple of months before it is deployed, then add another 2 weeks for bug fixes, and at the same time, we wikipedia users have to figure out how the community should actually employ it (e.g., who-does-what with it). This means that the DVD will probably be ready long before the versioning is, and as such, I suspect it's going to be a raw database dump.
Mediawiki 1.5 (which should be out soon - a couple of months, probably) will include a versioning system. Someone can mark a version as 'good', which in theory means no vandalism and no POV (point of view) issues. (who this is has not yet been determined - I suspect it will probably an admin)
I first heard about this back in July of 2004. The people at Mandrake had already approached some of our people, and told us they wanted to put Wikipedia on DVD. The stumbling block was, of course, copyright issues. We launched a copyright tagging project in August - basically, they did an sql dump of the list of all uploaded files that had no copyright tag and tagged them. In January, Angela sent them an email, telling them it was done, and that's when the DVD project actually started.
About 4 years ago, I was touring the US National Supercomputing Center in San Diego. One of the supercomputers had a clear plexiglass side where you could see inside, and it had running water and even a waterfall. Mind you, this 'water' was running directly over the electronic components. So the guy doing the tour said that it wasn't really water, but a chemical compound similiar to water, but very nonconductive. He tells us that it costs $10,000 per barrel, and that he always gets questions about what happens if you drink it. "Well, we're not sure what happens if you drink it, but we figure one of two things will happen. It could be toxic, and you drink it and die. Or, it could be nontoxic, and when our finicial guys found out you were drinking their $10,000-a-barrell water, they'll kill you."
Forget the funny mods, that should be modded (+5, tragic)
I can beat this by a mile. A friend-of-a-friend of mine got busted for changing 3 of her failing grades to A's. How? All the grades are filed electronically. She guessed one professor's password; two other times, she called up campus IT services, claimed to be a professor so-and-so, claimed she should log in, and could they change the password for her? And IT services happily went along. She was busted for (among other things) federal identity theft, which always struck me as odd since it never crossed state lines.
I had the great pleasure of showing that video to David Gerard, the principal author of Heavy Metal Umlaut. He was floored, and thought it was the greatest thing he ever saw :)
This circle of life you speak of - does it, by chance, involve a Zarg?
Ahem...
Another Wikipedian, a developer with Yahoo India, mentioned this on the Wikipedia village pump last night. Being that I handle the full-length music uploads almost single-handedly (you can see my progress here) I went and eagerly tried it out. The result was very disappointing. I searched for about 20 different songs on my wishlist (at the bottom of my user page. Most of the hits were mutopia MIDIs or bizticket e-donkey links --- eg, useless. So I search for the songs + (Ogg OR mp3). The only useful hits were to the Internet Archive and to the MIT free music site, both of which I have thoroughly plundered. So like I said, this was a sizeable letdown.
In the last year, I've had several incidents where I needed to access old articles from the Nature, the ACM, and IEEE. (old = 2, 4, and 33 years old respectively). Let me tell you, there is NOTHING more infuriating than not being able to access these when you need them. Bugmenot helps some, but not always.
...before I put Xenu as Wikipedia's daily featured article, I made damn sure to get Jimbo's permission (in the year+ I have been choosing the main page featured articles, the only other time I asked his permission before running a featured article was before putting up Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Good thing I asked too, because 2 days later, we were blocked in China (for a second time))
When I saw this story, I immediately thought of that simpsons episode where Homer has the internet startup, and Bill Gates tells his two goons to "Buy him out, boys"
Wikipedia is not an experiment in democracy. (That link might not work at the moment because Wikipedia is experiencing server problems). You might also want to see Jimbo's comment on the matter.
Just to be picky - he didn't say they out to be chopped off, he said something to the effect that if the top 10 stories were chopped off, the UN wouldn't be any different. He didn't advocate chopping them off, he was pointing out that the UN has a huge bureacracy, which is true afterall (Remember, this is the same organization that added Sudan to the select human rights commission *while* it was committing genocide in Darfur) On the other hand, appointing him was another in the Bush administration's long line of diplomatic fuck ups.
You do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when using it.
Bullshit. You can't dictate where people have a right to privacy, because the law says that if enough people think that a particular medium is private, it (legally) is, and you need a wiretap order to access it. And I'd bet the vast majority of people who use these services believe their conversations should be private.
It's not dead - Netcraft hasn't uttered a word yet ;)
Wikipedia is a non-profit website, run by volunteers, and we're our traffic double every quarter or two. Being slow is a natural consequence of this. The bottleneck is not bandwidth (of which we have plenty, for now), but servers. Also, please point out a single other non-profit in the alexa top 100 - you won't find any.
Stacey is definitely a guy -- see this picture I took of him at the New York City meetup (he's the one on the right).
You might find the Developer's blog an interesting read. Also, Jamesday (our chief sysadmin) tells me that the 10 servers they ordered in January should be up and running by the end of the month.
Derek programmed a bot to do this with US census data, but there are some users who are doing this manually for cities in other countries. Yeesh :)
Also, (and I talked with him about this when I met him in person) it's going to be interesting to see what happens in 2010 when the next census data comes out.
Some article inherently attract users who push a certain point of view (called POV pushers), which goes against Wikipedia's core principle that our articles should have a neutral tone and point of view (called our NPOV policy). Thankfully, most of these articles are high visibility, so POV pushers tend to be vastly outnumbered on these topics, and quickly grow disillusioned.
That's coming down the pike. Although things are fairly nebulous at this point, within the next year, we expect to have a system with 2 versons - an "approved" (e.g., vandalism free) version and a live version, but implimentation details are still undecided.