6 million pages! A quick look at their distribution:
3.6M of these pages got less than 10 views during December. 4.3M pages got less than 100 views each. 2.3M got less than 1000 views. That's the long tail. On the other side 680K pages got more than 1,000 views, 111K pages got more than 10k views, only 6k pages got more than 100k views, and 90 pages were able to gather more than 1M views (Star Wars, The Mandalorian, The Witcher...).
In summary: The top 7.2% of Wikipedia pages earn 87% of all the monthly views.
Yesterday I posted a deeper analysis on how these pages get their daily views:
Whenever seeing the staggering number of Wikipedia articles it reminds me of my own recent experience with creating an article. To centralize some of the knowledge of now niche set of keyboards (manufactured by what used to be one of the FAANGs of its time) I set to create a page. After adding some - what I thought - useful and interesting data, the page got deleted as it was not "notable" enough, i.e. lacking sufficient number of external references. These keyboards did exist and are used until this day however are not as popular (and therefore not as commented/described) like Apple's keyboards (which do have their own page on Wikipedia) so the line was drawn there. In the end I found it funny and also interesting to see how Wikipedia works. If the editors were not so strictly bound to the set of rules there would be probably tens of millions of articles/pages now.
Another experience I had was watching a video on YouTube from Japan where a guy was brewing coffee which reminded me that the brand of the coffee equipment used in the video is sometimes sold in coffee shops in Europe. I wanted to know a little bit more about the company so I went to Wikipedia - the English page got deleted because there was little information about the company on the English speaking part of the Internet. This does not say anything about the company (which seems to be hugely popular in Japan and certain social circles in Europe), rather it demonstrates the limit of the model Wikipedia uses for curating the articles.
There is a struggle between "deletionist" and "inclusionist" factions within Wikipedia. One side tends to find fault (many times real faults, mind you) and err on the side of deletion; the other prefers to err on the side of inclusion in Wikipedia.
All agree they want to keep some standard of quality in Wikipedia, they just disagree on the method and threshold for deletion.
Just be aware Wikipedia is not a single hive-mind :)
I find all of this really hilarious especially considering that a lot of Wikipedia is about trivial stuff like entertainment (films, sports, anime, whatnot), but whenever someone tries to a document something technical in the wrong way ... NO SOUP FOR YOU!
I find it really really rude and disrespectful to just trample over other volunteers' work like this. I'm all for deleting crap, but outright deletion instead of offering suggestions first and then being super-defensive when asked "hey, what's up?" Yeah nah, that doesn't fly. It's like just closing people's PRs on GitHub without offering suggestions on how to fix the patch first with just a single line of "doesn't fit code standards", "doesn't work on Windows", or just a link to a lengthy page.
Guess everyone is too busy fighting over capitalisation of movies titles or whether or not the Stanley Kubrick article should have an infobox to offer meaningful suggestions to new users shrug.
On Wikipedia, the biggest asshole with the most persistence wins. They've deluded themselves in to thinking this is "meritocracy".
I guess you're an inclusionist then. A lot of people agree with you. (Note some in the deletionist camp want to delete many of the articles about trivial stuff!).
I find Wikipedia articles on technical/science subjects tend to be higher quality (with some exceptions of course), those on history tend to be so-so, those about current political matters tend to be outrageously one-sided, and those on pop culture matters are often hilarious -- an article on a subject related to anime can be a lot longer and more detailed than one about real history!
Back in the olden days I remember there used to be a Wikipedia article about vampires, written from the point of view of someone in the "vampire community" who wrote about them as if "vampirism" was a "lifestyle", and when it got edited/deleted of course these people threw a fit. But this was a clear case of garbage that doesn't belong in a general encyclopedia.
Contributing to Wikipedia, especially in topics where there is controversy, is very frustrating. Like you said, the person with the most time or clout with the online community tends to "win". Having lots of rules of the form WP:<this or that> in order to overwhelm you and make you give up can feel very tiresome. This is why I don't contribute; I simply don't have the time for it.
Still find Wikipedia immensely useful though. I'm glad it exists.
Well, not really. I'm mostly a "treat people's time with respect"-ist. The biggest problem I have is not so much with deleting as such, but rather that for some this seems to be the first tool they use once they see something that they think is not a good fit. Not everyone in the deletionist camp is like that, but there are quite a lot of them and you will run in to these people sooner rather than later.
I've saved more than a bit of content by just copy/pasting the deleted content somewhere else (instead of a separate article), or just by Googling for a few extra references.
These numbers don’t add up... does the 4.3M pages that got less than 100 include the 3.6M that got less than 10? I should image so, otherwise that’s 7.9M pages. But then you say only 2.3M got less than 1000 views? That obviously can’t include the less than 100 or 10’s, but if you add them then you’re at 6.6M..??
Wow that's fascinating, I'd never really thought about page distribution.
I have good feeling that the majority of those views are due to Google providing the answer for almost anything that can be found on Wikipedia in an "instant search result" box. It has a wikipedia link beneath it to read more, and I guess many people do.
Sometimes I worry about projects about Wikipedia and the Archive. When will they run out of storage space and money? When will it become too big to handle?
That will never happen for Wikipedia. Their content is tiny in disk space and not growing very fast. They are also drowning in money, despite what their donation begging messages claim.
The Internet Archive, on the other hand, is drowning in data and pinching pennies. Still, they're doing okay, and the constant decrease in per-gigabyte HDD costs are allowing them to continue for the time being. They absolutely need and deserve your donations, however.
If HDD price/gig stopped going down, however, they might be in a lot of trouble.
The amount of data is growing superlinearly while their resources (probably) aren't, so a dropping price for storage is currently allowing them to keep up (if just barely so).
A stream of perpetual future payments does not need to be decrease exponentially (or decrease at all) to have finite present value. A contract to receive $1/year forever (which you can resell or leave as inheritance etc.) is worth 1/r, where r is the risk-free rate of return at the time the contract is sold. At 1% interest a $1 perpetuity is worth $100 — the amount of money you’d have to put in a bank today to expect to get $1 in interest per year forever.
Yes, but look at how those $91M break down. Almost all "actual" expenses (including hosting) went down from last year, but the salaries continued to grow by several million, as they do every single year. I love Wikipedia, but I've stopped donating for that reason.
The problem with Wikimedia salaries is that they often are allocated to some projects / roles that don't have much to do with the principal activity (Wikipedia). Although I recognize that it is important to fund / subsidize stuff that won't otherwise be included, I wish their final goal was more concentrated on the wellbeing of Wikipedia, rather than other minor projects.
> In 2005, Wikipedia co-founder and Wikimedia Foundation founder Jimmy Wales told a TED audience: So, we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it's really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about US$5,000, and that's essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee … We actually hired Brion because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.
2005: bandwidth cost of $5000 in with 1.4 billion page views
$104,505,783 in revenue ($97,748,964 from donations)
$81,442,265 in expenses ($38,597,407 salary, $2,342,130 tech costs, others)
I am not that educated on their operations but it seems a bit crazy to me how only 2.4 million out of all expenses is the server costs. And the 39 million salaries are all to their employees none of which do the actual content contribution
Going from 1.5 billion page views at $5000 to 15 billion page views at 82 million is crazy imo.
The WMF does quite a few things besides paying for the hosting costs of Wikipedia. As one example, their latest project is Wikidata, a general-purpose, language-independent knowledge base which already gets more edits over time than the English Wikipedia does. Given that developing such a generally-useful knowledge base has been a "holy grail" of AI for literally decades and that Wikidata is freely available at zero cost right now, those donations might already be more than paying for themselves.
There was a behind-the-scenes talk at 36c3 in Dec 2019 where a few Wikipedia Admins show what the infrastructure looks like and what they actually do: Infrastructure of Wikipedia https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-73-infrastructure-of-wikipedia
> 90 pages were able to gather more than 1M views (Star Wars, The Mandalorian, The Witcher...).
So they could cut their network costs by a lot if they just removed pages about current popular culture, which have the highest view rate and a cultural value of exactly zero.
Edit: I'm being sarcastic and a bit bitter, the comments below all make good points. However I find it sad, though unavoidable, that the highest page views are for highly marketed entertainment franchises that have a slim chance to withstand the test of time.
I hope you recognise that this is only your opinion. The beauty about a crowd-sourced encyclopedia is that you don't get to define what other people find interesting or of cultural value. The (utopic) mission of Wikipedia is to encompass the whole human knowledge, and that includes a lot of niche topics which might be interesting only for a small amount of people, but it is not limited to that. I love that Wikipedia has a lot of info on "current" (i.e. popular right now) topics, as I get to know what I want to know avoiding the gazillion ads (even though I blackhole all of them) or click-baity titles from the rest of the internet.
This is dangerously dismissive. Cultural value is subjective, and in any case these articles provide an in-road to other articles, giving the opportunity to expand people’s knowledge further.
I would, however, support Wikipedia having ads on articles in such pop culture categories – and those alone, of course, to avoid conflict of interest where factual accuracy is more vital. This would have to be carefully managed by the Wikimedia Foundation — marking articles for monetisation should be handled only by a specific role – but if done quite carefully and in a privacy- and user-respecting manner (eg Carbon ads [0]) could potentially subside the academic content without damaging Wikipedia’s brand.
That's a terrible idea in my opinion, any advertising at all on Wikipedia would be the thin edge of a very unpleasant wedge. Wikipedia is many people's first stop for knowledge, we really don't want people being able to buy eyeball space next to what's supposed to be unbiased content.
Additionally, expanding advertising generally is a bad move when exposure to advertising has been shown to be negatively correlated to quality of life and contentedness. We need to be transitioning away from advertising as a primary driver of the online economy, not fuelling it further. Advertising should only be employed when there's no better option in my opinion, not the first thing you reach for monetising a site. We should see advertising like fossil fuels, a regrettable necessity that we should aim to phase out.
As soon as you open the barn door for having ads at all, the floodgates will open. Also a pointless concession given Wikipedia has far more money than they need.
If Wikipedia ever puts ads up because of the bureaucratic WMF cancer exceeding donations, that's the day Wikipedia dies.
There is little money in creating a piece of artwork that lasts 300yrs, like a church or an exquisite painting for the producer. Companies can't survive on that, all the money goes to magic pop art and maybe some heroic efforts. After that you're outside the system. To quote a fading movie, you either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain (dead genius).
You probably know it and it feels worth saying anyway. I yearn for the enduring masterpiece that transcends simply 'changing the game' and is instead appreciated for its own being for hundreds of years.
More to the point, what even is "cultural value?" After Googling it, I found that it doesn't even seem to be a well defined phrase, much less a quantifiable concept.
Wikipedia uses notability[1] to decide which articles to include. Notability is defined as significant coverage in 3rd party sources. Popular movies are "notable" because other people write about them.
There's too much in art that relies on unmeasured effects like the impact on the audience's consciousness and the execution on structure and intention to be bothered with numbers beyond box office or critic reviews. You could measure something related to those concepts and you would be capturing a fourth of available judgement for cultural impact.
Culture is a game we have been playing for thousands of years. Art pieces with an observable influence on other artists, the public audience or any human decision making along with an ability to survive the wear and tear of existing in the world as an artwork is a good place to start summarizing an artwork's cultural value.
A grand cathedral like st peter's stands as an example of high quality baroque architecture, the value of the church as an institution. It remains intact after a large number of years, not having been physically deconstructed. It's influence on other artists is common to this day, recently used as a baroque example of maximalism on HN. The site attracts visitors and has yet to be rivalled in it's unique baroque grandeur.
Those influences are quantifiable, and kind of comparable to a flash in a pan like a Hollywood film that gets most of its attention and influence in the first few months then sits in an institutional back pocket whilst other artists denigrate it so that new films can occupy the spotlight and the cycle continues. These films are sometimes used as reference for making new films and the industry puts out two similar styles of film at the same time reducing uniqueness. Generally otherwise left to sit in DVD/bluray jewel cases or disney vaults as they fall out of favour.
You can rank these impacts and have conversations over which interpretive labels they fit into and conclude some are mor valuable than others.
I’m a big fan of Wikipedia. It’s not perfect, and plenty of pages are outright bad, but repeatedly clicking “random page” [1] is a great source of entertainment to me. There’s so much info out there, yet I reliably get something surprising, interesting, or funny within maybe 10 random pages. And because it’s random, I learn things way outside my normal interests.
Try it if you find yourself mindlessly scrolling! It’s pretty easy but you find way more cool things (that typically people don’t broadly know about, if you like that sort of thing).
I donate a few bucks a month and it’s well worth it.
Wikipedia is AWESOME and I admire your selflessness & generosity in donating to a cause :)
However, before giving them any more money I would recommend reading through the (Wikipedia-hosted, ironically) article titled "Wikipedia has Cancer". The revenue vs. employee count/operating costs ratio is way off. Like, orders of magnitude off.
It's a tough pill to swallow considering how useful the site is and their respectable "information should be free for all" mission.
Again, your generosity is admired and there are far worse causes to donate towards. Just want to make sure people see both sides of the coin before spending hard earned cash!
I remember this essay, the author’s main argument was: Wikipedia seemed fine 10 years ago with 5% of its current money, so the increased spending (and calls for donations to cover it) seems unjustified.
I side with the author in requesting more transparency about what exactly donations get spent on, but this strict argument in terms of how spending growth just “looks” unreasonable isn’t convincing. Namely, it’s pretty plausible to me that scaling big to very big is more costly than scaling medium to big, so this comparison of increasing costs to cancer makes me skeptical.
I don’t have any proof that Wikipedia uses donations judiciously, but the scale and quality of the service they offer relative to the annual revenue (about 100m) and expenses (about 80m) seems...pretty good.
At any rate, I mostly view this as “paying a little for a good service” rather than “donating efficiently”.
They're actually pretty transparent in their annual report [0].
The issue is that their ads are slightly misleading in that they hint that they might have to pull the plug ("we depend on donations [...] we need your help [...] time is running out in 2019 to help us") even though the time is running out in 2019 part is because they're running the ads during the end of the year, not because they're running out of money. They spent 46 million in salaries out of 120 million in revenue, while the hosting expenses are one of their smallest line items at 2.3 million.
That article is pretty unfair. The Wikimedia Foundation has started a lot of other projects since 2005, several of which are very useful and contribute to their general mission to bring knowledge to everyone. Wikibooks, Wikidata, and Wiktionary spring to mind, among others. They've also become the point of reference for almost everything for the entire internet-connected population, which legitimately requires more PR people, more lawyers, and much higher administrative costs, just to maintain their original level of quality in the face of adversarial governments, megacorporations, and every troll with a keyboard. The relative lack of scandals, disasters, and press attacks in the current climate is borderline miraculous.
Compare Wikimedia to, say, Mozilla. Another high-tech open-access-focused non-profit (sort of), and with 5x higher revenues ($500 million!). They've also spent most of it on new projects and skyrocketing administrative overhead. Yet their PR is much worse, they suffer falling market share, and nobody uses most of their side projects. Wikimedia is still efficient and effective given the arenas it competes in.
I feel like if I applied this reasoning I wouldn't give any money to any cause. There is always waste, no organization is perfectly managed. To be fair, it doesn't mean they shouldn't be open to criticism.
So the donation goes to the foundation while its gender bias comes from its editors - who already don't get paid so stopping donations will not matter.
If anything, the Foundation will need to run programs to fix the status quo (e.g. outreach programs to potential authors who come from underrepresented groups or likely to write about underrepresented topic), so donating money (in addition to volunteering for outreach programs or contributing tech support) are some ways to help with that.
The editors and the organization are the same thing. The organization sets policy and culture, and editors do all of the actual work. Diversity and equality don't cost money.
>> The editors and the organization are the same thing. The organization sets policy and culture, and editors do all of the actual work.
I don't think this is correct. Policy and culture are mostly bottom-up from the editors, and the foundation has no hard power except for extreme cases like banning outright harassers.
In addition, withholding money from the foundation does not cause any pressure at all to editors because they never get paid from that money anyway.
>> Diversity and equality don't cost money
Sure, but so far most of the efforts to improve diversity seem to come from the foundation rather than the editors, so punishing the foundation seems like the wrong option.
Since this is hackernews... Other than donating please also consider contributing by coding would also be helpful. Editors rely on tools for many tasks (e.g. to detect & fight vandalism, for article evaluation, analytics, to do tedious tasks such as mass edits), and these tools are often open source. Mediawiki (the software on which Wikipedia runs) are always building features and doing bugfixes. Also, while the English Wikipedia is quite endowed with prolific programmers, many of its sister Wikipedias are less so and often lack basic tools, and there's a lot to do there.
It's easy to forget how amazing Wikipedia is because people are so used to it. It's also an anomaly in todays internet landscape - no ads, popups or auto-play videos. I think it's literally the best website in existence.
If you suggested 20 years ago that there will soon exist a free online encyclopedia, which has two orders of magnitude more words than Britannica, is updated daily and is mostly unbiased - they would probably think it's impossible.
Most websites start out like wikipedia and then they feel the constant pressure to expand and now they have a mountain of expenses to cover so they tarnish the website in an effort to squeeze every last $ out of the user. I like how wikipedia has stuck to its original goal and kept a lean budget while delivering one of the most used websites on the internet.
There are two candidates for "best website in existence," both were made by people born in countries that spawned from the dissolution of the USSR, and one starts with "sci-" while the other starts with "Lib." One ends with "hub" while the other ends with "Gen."
It's only shame that Wikidata doesn't get as much attention. It's a knowledge graph that runs _some_ of Wikipedia's content. I became involved recently and what I'd like to do is to get Wikipedians to use Wikidata more (e.g. automatically loading births and deaths on people's profiles), because once these two services are more interlinked, we're gonna get more knowledge graph info for free since people editing Wikipedia will keep improving this structured dataset.
I'd encourage people to get involved in either of these two projects - there's always a niche you know about and could improve its presence in the Wiki world.
Is Wikidata how, for example, when a particular football team wins the Super Bowl, its articles are updated, the articles about the Super Bowl are updated, the article about the list of teams that have won multiple Super Bowls is updated, etc... all very quickly? Or is that just an army of volunteers.
1. If all superbowl-related articles used an extraction mechanism that links wikipedia with wikidata, then only the wikidata entry needs updating and all these articles get updated automatically.
2. That wikidata update I mentioned was manual, but a lot of data in Wikidata is updated automatically (e.g. births and deaths from some databases, city population counts etc.), so some things get updated across the board automatically. That's a source of pushback against this - articles being updated automatically, so bad actors can change a lot of things at once.
I struggle to find anything interesting on this page. It is apparently a "topic of geography", whatever that means as a statement. It has a WordLift URL. It is an instance of an inner planet.
The first perhaps verifiable, solid fact, that Earth has a diameter of "12,742 kilometre", is immediately suspect. There is no clarifying remark, not even a note, that Earth is not any uniform shape and cannot have a single value as
its diameter.
This is my problem with SPARQL, with "data bases", in that sense. Data alone is useless without a context or a framework in which it can be truly understood. Facts like this can have multiple values depending on exactly what you're measuring, or what you're using the measurement for.
And this on the page for Earth, an example that is used on their front page, and has the ID of 2. It is the second item to ever be created in Wikidata, after Q1, "Universe", and yet everything on it is useless.
Wikipedia is the most incredible creation in modern times. Because it's not about some law of the universe that people have learned enough about to use to their advantage like electricity or nuclear physics. It's something inherent to us as a species that we came together to create a resource for everyone to access and that it has such a high level of quality. The culture around Wikipedia - the culmination of knowledge, the importance of said knowledge, the random curiosity of such a wide variety of topics and so much more, says so much about us as people.
If you had asked me half a century ago if something like this would ever work - I would've said absolutely not. And yet, there it is.
> It's something inherent to us as a species that we came together to create a resource for everyone to access and that it has such a high level of quality.
Oh man, if only it were true! If anything, wikipedia should be seen as an overcoming of our terrible human nature in making something good in the world, not as a property of humans. It is SO precious and fragile in our mortal hands.
The story of the Encyclopédie's origins is incredible and a great reminder that works like wikipedia are the exception, not the rule. The Philosophes worked very hard to get the volumes out and were under constant threat of censure. The very idea of the Encyclopédie was a direct threat to the Ancient Regime and it's publication was a direct cause (among many) of the French Revolution. A revolution whose effects we feel until this very day. The Encyclopédie was a lit cigarette in a powder cache. It's head editor, Diderot, is still a controversial person. If you can have haters and lovers nearly 250 years after you dance your last, well kiddo, you've done something right.
Even today wikipedia is vandalized by powerful interests and is routinely censored out of existence for many of the people of the world. Governments are still afraid of the free knowledge that wikipedia gives us. It is still a lit cigarette in a powder cache. But it is a fragile thing.
Most of the work on Wikipedia is done by unpaid editors.
On the other hand, Wikimedia Foundation (the one that collects donations and manages the project) is accumulating donations and increasing spendings at ever-increasing rates, way above its maintenance and development needs. Just google a bit. Something like this: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9qqds7Z3Ykd9Kdeay/... Their history of being wasteful and not transparent about their spending is rather long.
I, like almost every person at the time, heard about wikipedia and scoffed at it. And, in the early days,the quality was atrocious and the scope seemingly insurmountable. But wikipedia almost ever gets better, not worse, and the limitation that the books have to sit on a shelf makes wikipedia far more than an encyclopedia. It has evolved, through time, to be something few people ever imagined it could be.
People tend to be super critical of wikipedia but I think it could have been a whole lot worse. We are incredibly lucky that wikipedia isn't owned by some tech megacorp, it isn't loaded with spyware JS bogging it down, and it doesn't require an account to use.
> We are incredibly lucky that wikipedia isn't owned by some tech megacorp, it isn't loaded with spyware JS bogging it down, and it doesn't require an account to use.
There was Google's attempt in 2007 wih knol(0) - which many called an attempt at a Wikipedia killer. Agreed... We dodged a bullet.
Authors could also choose to include ads from Google's AdSense on their pages ... All contributors to the Knol project had to sign in with a Google account ... authors were also able to choose the CC-BY-NC-3.0 license (which prohibits commercial reuse) or traditional copyright protection instead.
I think the most fascinating thing is the bit about how people criticized google for placing knol results in more accessible spots on google search and the conflict of interest. This is exactly the same debate we are having over a decade later about AMP.
Their scheme is ranking by popular domain name. This, as a rule, makes shit content rise to the top. A debate about how bad this idea is shouldn't last long. That said, the question then becomes if google.com is worthy of this favoritism. It unquestionably qualifies here. So there is no-such-thing as placing knol in a more accessible spot. google.com is just a more popular website than wikipedia.
On IMDb it is only the rating system that is totally gamed, very warped. I usually look at the distribution of the individual User Review ratings. If they are mostly 10's and 1's the movie is usually crap (a large chunk of Hollywood 'blockbusters' are here), even though the aggregate rating is an 8+. Fairer distributions with 6, 7's and 8's and this might be worth watching. There can be spoilers in the review titles, though.
One thing that is fun to do after watching a totally crap movie - to make up for 2 wasted hours of your life - is read the 1-rated reviews. There is usually some brilliant sarcastic analysis there to make you laugh out loud.
They were hijacking every link on mobile a while ago and messing with my browser so bad.
Surely, there wasn't any "spyware js".
A small sticky donate button on bottom would have been better.
Wikipedia pages in general are fine because people constantly have to edit spammers out from them. They haven't done much to curb similar looking spam clearly distinct from content.
[Our super scale webhosting powers google services](superwebhosting.in) everywhere...I don't remember the times I had to remove it from the history of cloud providers, tech companies, web, https, etc.
Forget half a century ago! Even when I was in high school in 2005 (while I was getting a vastly better education from personal curiosity on Wikipedia than from public school) it was widely accepted that it would be ludicrous to believe anything in Wikipedia since anyone can edit it.
I remember an episode of "The Office" where Michael Scott states that Wikipedia is very accurate, "because anybody can edit it". And that was the joke. Michael Scott being naive and gullible enough to believe this ridiculous statement, while other characters made exasperated reaction shots for the camera.
A lot has changed since the mid-2000's. Wikipedia was so revolutionary at the time.
I remember telling people in 2004 or so how it would take over and people thought I was crazy. There were something like 10,000 articles then. One coworker didn't believe anyone could edit it so he edited a page for the fun of it. A few hours later someone had reverted it, which led him to believe more in it.
As they say, Wikipedia doesn't work in theory, only in practice.
As longtime GNU/Linux user then, I viewed the GPL as the foundation to it. Encyclopedias seemed a niche where a GPL-based project could thrive, like in making an operating system or web server.
> It's something inherent to us as a species that we came together to create a resource for everyone to access and that it has such a high level of quality
I like the explanation that Wikipedia is built on nerds' need to correct each other.
Please don't hate on my comment, all I can do is ask not to be downvoted, at least I tried. Here is my case against Wikipedia. In a capitalistic model it makes little sense why Wikipedia should thrive without enriching someone so massively in the process, therefore, it must be corrected. If we assume that line of thinking is valid (which I'm not saying we should or shouldn't) then it follows that an alternative Wikipedia riddled with ads would be a superior model, in terms of capitalism. It'd be much more similar to imdb perhaps, owned by Amazon. Wikipedia (in the film category) provides information in a much effective way and can stay on top of change by issuing revisions way better than imdb can ever do.
If we jump to the most logical conclusion of the set of assumptions made above I think it then follows that readily accessible knowledge cannot necessarily be a good thing, otherwise, the market would have rewarded that. But we see in the case of imdb market did not reward it enough for it to achieve the same pedigree as Wikipedia.
It's not good for people to learn facts that easily. There should be a higher cost associated with that. This is of course a ridiculous conclusion but I think it could make sense why it would be true. It is a whole other post for why it would be true but I will only give an example or two.
One example is if knowledge is that easily accessible then anyone could achieve it without necessarily having enough desire to achieve said knowledge, and since we have limited capacity for knowledge acquisition and retainment we are most likely sacrificing knowledge that we are truly passionate about.
Second example is maybe it isn't good for people to know so much anyway. After all there are many things that due to the laws of nature we are inherently incapable of ever knowing such as what is beyond knowable universe (nothing can travel faster than speed of light so we cannot learn about it since the knowledge or light from stuff beyond the knowable universe won't have enough time to ever reach us.)
Ha, I don't actually think people are downvoting me as much as I expected. Also you seem to be confusing cause and effect. The 1st sentence of my post was asking not to be downvoted, even if people did downvote later on I had no way of knowing that when I wrote that comment.
> In a capitalistic model it makes little sense why Wikipedia should thrive without enriching someone so massively in the process, therefore, it must be corrected
Err what? If a model of reality is incorrect you throw out the model, you dont try to modify reality to fit the model.
This is akin to saying something like: Solar panels* dont work in classical physics therefore coal is better.
* iana physicist. I assume they have something to do with quantum physics but dont really know
Well sometimes you do, McDonald's exists not because the food they provide is perfectly nutritious and what a human body needs to remedy hunger. I already concede that capitalism does distort reality.
I dont even know what you are trying to claim. Is one of your premises that capitalism predicts the highest quality product wins at the marketplace? Because that's not what capitalism is. If it was we would all be eating at 5 star resturants all the time as they have the highest quality product when you ignore price.
Are you trying to claim that part of the reason mcdonald's is succesful is because they have a lot of money to spend on advertising and inertia? If so you are misunderstanding my point (or its just a non sequitor). The fact that gaining a lot of capital allows you an (arguably unfair, especially relative to idealized capitalism) advantage in the market place has nothing to do with my criticism that you are fallaciously finding evidence that contradicts your simplified model and then concluding that reality is wrong instead of your model.
You're glossing over that Wikipedia would not be feasible if you had to pay people to do it, and if it were not free, you'd have to pay people to do it. Your "capitalistic model" likely does not correspond sufficiently to reality to be useful. And why did you write this comment? There is no need for a "case against Wikipedia."
I agree with asdfasgasdgasdg, and don't understand your reasoning.
Imho the fact that Wikipedia is not commercially marketized is inherent to its success. Feels like a breath of fresh air to have such a rich source of open access information, to search for e.g. medical info rather than trusting Google with it.
If anything, Wikipedia shows to me that people have a longing for more initiatives like that, and they will then reject commercial alternatives that exist.
Did you copypaste that guy's name, or did you type the whole thing out? Did you have his comment out in a second window so you could look back and forth to check your spelling?
The real question is did you copy and paste and searched for it to see if it is actually the same username or did you just guess that they're the same spelling?
You can only reach these sort of conclusions if you put capitalism on a stand, like a god from which everything true clearly must derive. Like an axiom. If that's what you believe, then so be it. But otherwise what you're saying seems to be nothing more than a random walk.
Wikipedia is an incredible achievement. It's one of the only information sources I find to be consistently useful across a broad range of topics. It's also one of the only remaining sources I feel to be mostly trustworthy.
These days I append either "wikipedia" or "reddit" to most of my Google searches in order to get useful information. There's so much SEO'd garbage out there, but Wikipedia remains a breath of fresh air.
If you're worried about SEO and manipulation, Wikipedia is decent but Reddit is awful. It's pretty well-established by now that astroturfing and influence campaigns are rampant on Reddit, and in some particularly bad cases like /r/worldnews have taken over subreddits completely.
I wouldn't use reddit to find credible info about world events or trending topics.
However, it's an excellent source for finding information about hobbies and niche topics. The culinary subreddits have great recipe advice and I'll often go there to find best practices for food safety or unfamiliar techniques. Appending "reddit" to the end of my search means I don't have to sift through hundreds of SEO'd blog posts with questionable advice! For the time being, people don't SEO their reddit comments.
Now that I think of it, I actually do this quite often--Google really isn't what it used to be.
It's also good anthropologically, for at least some segment of the population. I've found the zeitgeist of Reddit comments on (eg) political topics to pretty consistently predict shifts in broader political culture.
Most of the internet moves homogenously now. Fortnite streamers, reddit, hn, hollywood and Stephen Colbert all hit the same thematic marks in roughly the same time periods. Slashdot one or two days later.
I disagree. There are fairly distinct cultures; Stephen Colbert+Hollywood have quite a different overall view on many political topics than, say, /r/politics or /r/Economics does.
I have my suspicions about /r/ukpolitics as well. During the last few UK election campaigns the place has read like there's enough astroturf to supply the next dozen Olympics.
You could switch to duckduckgo and use the ! codes; !r and !w search directly on reddit and wikipedia.
In cases where you aren't searching directly on one of the supported sites, and would prefer google's algorithms instead of ddg's (or reddit's), all you have to do is add !g. It's a lot easier than trying to get google to do direct searches (using site:) or search on ddg (I don't think google has any shortcuts for redirecting to search on another search engine).
The ability to search these sites directly is also built in to most browsers. No need to send your query through any search engine.
Firefox setup:
- Go to the page with the search you want, e.g. wikipedia.com
- Right-click the search box
- "Add a Keyword for this search"
- Type your "keyword" e.g. w
Now any time you want to search wikipedia, go to the URL bar and type w plus a space first, then your search term.
Chrome setup:
I haven't used Chrome for a while but it also has this feature. You add "keywords" for your site searches somewhere in the settings instead of via right-clicking the search box, but the usage once it's set up is the same.
The standard argument against this is that it’s not very standardised. “wtde” will give you German Wiktionary no matter what browser you’re on. The cost of adding a code for every use case needed on every browser can get frustrating, whereas many bangs on DDG can be easily inferred, and then immediately used. The only cost then is changing a search engine.
I don't know about Reddit, but for Wikipedia I just write a guess for the title of the article I'm looking for, and if I'm not redirected to the proper title of the article, then I'm normally sent to a disambiguation page. I've never found myself in need of something like Google for Wikipedia.
That works if you know the article you want, but for something more abstract wiki search is terrible
I just came up with this example on the spot, searching wikipedia for "inventor of paracetamol", the first result on wiki search is "Polymorphism", then "Diphenhydramine", then "List of Suicides", then "Menstruation"
Searching google for "inventor of paracetamol wiki" links to the wikipedia Paracetamol page subsection History
Wikipedia search works well for me. The site search is exhaustive, returning every single page matching the query. For topics in the news recently, all changes are propagated to Wikipedia's search index immediately, while Google takes longer to recognize changes.
If you speak other languages Wikipedia certainly gets very interesting. German Wikipedia is pretty good, for some topics it is better than English Wikipedia. But Spanish Wikipedia is quite sad to read, todays articles have the quality I remember from when Wikipedia was 2 or 3 years old even though there are many times more Spanish than German speakers in the world.
Then there are the Swedish and Cebuana Wikipedias which are large but were mostly created by a bot with almost useless stub articles.
It makes me wonder what information sources other countries like China, India or Japan use.
I absolutely recommend people don't stay just think of the English version as the default. Other language communities certainly produce better articles on subjects they're closer to or where they have a better scholarly tradition. I tend to consult the German and Catalan (!) versions quite a bit, besides the French and English ones.
What's always struck me is how large the Dutch Wikipedia is (1,992,551 articles), given the relatively low number of people that speak that language. They would appear to be a pretty tech-savvy/well-connected nation.
It's certainly consistent with the number of comments that I see here on HN that start with some variation on "Here in the Netherlands...".
Wikipedia is great. Every time I create an article, it ends up being tended to by a bunch of gardener bots who fix up all the markup and make it look nice and put an infobox in, and then other people add a little and so on and it just gets better. Honestly, pretty astounding.
How's https://golden.com doing? I have come across some really detailed Wikipedia articles (for sports events, for example) and at times some really drab ones which I try to edit to improve. But original research articles sometimes do contain a lot more specific information that doesn't survive editor scrutiny on Wikipedia. And the less we talk about numerous advertisment/PR/fluff articles and socio/geo-political edit wars being played out, the better.
Take tech pages for example, I really think an enormous amount of information in blogs, online magazines, research papers need to be out there in Wikipedia pages too, if not as actual texts but as references.
For instance, here's an article on HAMT [0] and another on Radix Trees [1] but the corresponding Wikipedia pages [2][3] for those aren't as consumable as the other two.
There are also cases where pages are deleted because original research, like Willy Tarreau's EB Trees [4] that powers routing, caching on HAProxy.
I tend to research more on Wikipedia than search engines, to be honest. May be, the search engines can get smart enough to amalgamate a page on the searched topic given the amount of open-web they crawl?
Wikipedia is becoming so much more than an encyclopedia. I am constantly amazed at the level of detail people are willing to document things in.
For instance, I wanted to find which episode I was up to in a particular series, so I Google it, find a Wikipedia page for the series, and sure enough there's a table listing every season and every episode, with a short synopsis of each episode.
I'd say a very large portion of all page views are due to media related queries (TV shows, movies, books etc.).
"What is your favorite good article that you contributed significantly to, or assisted significantly in it obtaining good status?"
Ser Amantio di Nicolao : I have not worked on any good articles.
I can't read the article because the consent parameters for data collection are hidden behind layers upon layers of misleading UI and links, with a broken captcha inserted in the middle.
In what sense is there a certain "amount of work to do" defined independently of the number of volunteers and their interests?
The only thing I can think of is that as the wiki grows in size, the amount of work that needs to be done to maintain fixed quality (combating vandalism, counteracting normal decay, fixing link rot) goes up roughly proportional to the number and length of articles.
I guess you mean something like "Wikipedia ought to have an article on X, and didn't in 2007 but does in 2020". That certainly tracks the fact that there was more low-hanging fruit in 2007, but I don't think writing that article means there's any less work for a fixed number of editors to do. The amount of work left to do -- between here and a complete encyclopedia of all human knowledge -- is damn near infinite, and is limited mostly by editor interest.
Wikipedia's rules on notability and article length prevent it from growing infinitely (in theory). So my point is exactly that - all that "low-hanging fruit" is mostly gone, and most of the actual writing work that's left is either writing a new article on a subject that is at the margin of notability, which one would expect the average adult to have less interest in than writing a new article on a truly notable subject, or rewriting a section of an existing more notable article which tends to annoy whichever editor last edited it.
But you make a good point that the maintenance work probably grows linearly with the size of the corpus, so really the flat number of active editors shows that the number of editors actively engaged in the research and writing of entries has probably actually declined significantly since 2007.
> Wikipedia's rules on notability and article length prevent it from growing infinitely (in theory).
I take your point, but I would claim that Wikipedia is no where near the maximimum size set by the notability criterion. You can just look at the incredible depth it has on some niche topics like anime that happen to be of interest to the editor demographic (which do strain the notability criterion) and imagine that level of thoroughness on lots of other stuff like (e.g., "photobiology" is a weak page that came up hitting the random-article button).
> so really the flat number of active editors shows that the number of editors actively engaged in the research and writing of entries has probably actually declined significantly since 2007.
Yea, maybe, although improvements in automated maintenance tools may mean that a fixed or even decreasing number of editors could be maintaining the growing encyclopedia.
> Wikipedia's rules on notability and article length prevent it from growing infinitely (in theory).
That doesn't appear to be true. New people are born, new events occur, new things are discovered, and new entertainment is released every day, all of which increase the pool of eligible topics on Wikipedia. As long as history continues to be made, new articles will continue to be written.
Companies, sport, politics, arts, endless churn. It's not unusual to find out-of-date articles on Wikipedia. It also seems to be that a surprisingly small proportion of edits add new information.
As an English Wikipedia user, one obvious gap I've noticed is the lack of detailed information about the geography and history of countries where English is not natively spoken.
I can only imagine that as time goes on, more of these details will be filled in!
Wikipedia also is dominated by a elite class of early contributors, PC censorship people or people working directly for the cooperation or on their behalf. There are many accounts with more edits a day the humanly possible or 356 days of the year or article edits from IPs directly from government agencies whitewashing ... they do not even try or know how to hide it. When it comes to info outside of like nature science then wiki is NOT a re
Really isn't that many when you compare it with things like the English language has over 40,000 words that are 8 letters long. Something I looked up recently out of curiosity with regards to the UK TV show Countdown, which has been running for years and is of French origins.
There are competing philosophies on Wikipedia, deletionist vs inclusionist. Overall the inclusionists tend to win more than they loose, but the deletionists are a source of resistance to overcome. Some deletionist decisions have been decried as anti-intellectual, but they also contribute to the density of quality, so it's hard to say they're evil. More like neutrals with an incentive, but from the perspective of the self-ascribed "good" inclusionists, the vector between inclusion and deletion points toward evil, and is thus forever frustrating.
I don’t think that startup will succeed to the same degree as Wikipedia. Making an successful online encyclopedia isn’t a tech problem, it’s more of a community problem. And it’s stupidly hard to maintain such a vibrant community, moreso if for-profit entities are involved. I’ve seen so many cases where the contributors leave the website due to clashes with corporate members (see StackExchange for an example) In a for-profit service where content is made by contributors without any pay, there’s an inherent power imbalance between the contributors and the platform owners, and it’s natural that tensions will arise.
If the Wikimedia foundation lost their .org domains, not only would they need to find a new domain, but they wouldn’t be able to redirect requests from the billions of links to Wikipedia on the internet, and all those links would die.
I also don’t think that will happen. If the new .org owners took down a world-beloved high-traffic site like Wikipedia, the public outcry from people of all political persuasions would make government regulation of the domain become quite likely and I’m pretty sure .org’s new owners don’t want that smoke. I also don’t even know the rules, it might be impossible for them to do so for some technical reason.
To take a contrarian viewpoint: maybe Wikipedia isn't so good after all.
In a capitalistic model it makes little sense why Wikipedia should thrive without enriching someone so massively in the process, therefore, it must be corrected. If we assume that line of thinking is valid (which I'm not saying we should or shouldn't) then it follows that an alternative Wikipedia riddled with ads would be a superior model, in terms of capitalism. It'd be much more similar to imdb perhaps, owned by Amazon. Wikipedia (in the film category) provides information in a much effective way and can stay on top of change by issuing revisions way better than imdb can ever do.
If we jump to the most logical conclusion of the set of assumptions made above I think it then follows that readily accessible knowledge cannot necessarily be a good thing, otherwise, the market would have rewarded that. But we see in the case of imdb market did not reward it enough for it to achieve the same pedigree as Wikipedia.
It's not good for people to learn facts that easily. There should be a higher cost associated with that. This is of course a ridiculous conclusion but I think it could make sense why it would be true. It is a whole other post for why it would be true but I will only give an example or two.
One example is if knowledge is that easily accessible then anyone could achieve it without necessarily having enough desire to achieve said knowledge, and since we have limited capacity for knowledge acquisition and retainment we are most likely sacrificing knowledge that we are truly passionate about.
Second example is maybe it isn't good for people to know so much anyway. After all there are many things that due to the laws of nature we are inherently incapable of ever knowing such as what is beyond knowable universe (nothing can travel faster than speed of light so we cannot learn about it since the knowledge or light from stuff beyond the knowable universe won't have enough time to ever reach us.)
3.6M of these pages got less than 10 views during December. 4.3M pages got less than 100 views each. 2.3M got less than 1000 views. That's the long tail. On the other side 680K pages got more than 1,000 views, 111K pages got more than 10k views, only 6k pages got more than 100k views, and 90 pages were able to gather more than 1M views (Star Wars, The Mandalorian, The Witcher...).
In summary: The top 7.2% of Wikipedia pages earn 87% of all the monthly views.
Yesterday I posted a deeper analysis on how these pages get their daily views:
- https://towardsdatascience.com/interactive-the-top-2019-wiki...
Apparently the most popular pages are all related to movies (Avengers, Joker, ...), series (Ted Bundy, Chernobyl, Game of Thrones), and deaths.