Wikipedia Hits 300,000 Articles 507
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."
Congrats! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Congrats! (Score:2, Informative)
Note the new features (Score:2, Informative)
The Parent Poster (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Celebration! (Score:5, Informative)
And for good reason. (disclaimer: I am a Wikipedia contributor.) Also recommend Wikitravel [wikitravel.org].
consider donating... (Score:5, Informative)
http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising [wikimediafoundation.org]
(tax deductable too!)
Re:Funding? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Funding? (Score:2, Informative)
Almost all the money disappears immediately on servers to keep the online editing system going.
Re:DMCA Anyone (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Goatse (Score:3, Informative)
Don't be shy, post the link. [wikipedia.org]
Re:from the GNU/World departement (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Goverment Funding (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Copyright (Score:5, Informative)
I personally was responsible for pointing out an entry that was copied wholesale from an author's (copyrighted) web page containing electronic versions of his work. I did so after I noticed some of the language was kind of suspect, and Googling some of the phrases found the copyrighted work.
With the massive amounts of traffic Wikipedia gets, and as a result more people like me reading the pages, this problem tends to fix itself rather quickly. The same goes for fears of massive vandalism -- it gets fixed very soon.
Re:Wikipedia Interview (Score:3, Informative)
here is the announcement [gnu.org] and here's the interview [slashdot.org].
Well, It could be time for an update on what has happened within the last three years.
donation-based wikipedia (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikimediafoundation.org] and help to keep this information free and available for all of us.
Re:Celebration! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Congrats! (Score:2, Informative)
Wikipedia keymark (Score:4, Informative)
Funding - situation, what we spent the money on. (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Re:Size doesn't matters (Score:5, Informative)
Verified by whom? As all generalisations, this one is also not true
When it comes to some controversial topics, Britannica gives usually only one theory, presented as a god-given truth. Sometimes it isn't even the most agreed upon theory among scientists of the relevant field.
I haven't used B. for a long time, since it started to charge for access. Last time I did, it showed ``Arian inviasion'' as the only theory of indo-european language apearing in India.
Wikipedia on the other hand shows other theories, even some very unorthodox ones from Indian nationalists. But it clearly states that ``Arian inviasion'' isn't highly regarded at least since the fifties.
Same goes for ``balto-slavic theory'', breaking of Enigma before WW2 etc
Go, look for yourself.
Robert
Er, What about E2? (Score:4, Informative)
A much more enlightened and pleasant place to be.
Oh yes, and we have the EDB [everything2.com].
Re:Exactly how big is this thing? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Exactly how big is this thing? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Exactly how big is this thing? (Score:2, Informative)
You can download [wikimedia.org] this stuff easily, and it's obvious from recent Google searches that many people do [fact-index.com].
Re:Copyright (Score:2, Informative)
If a copyright holder does find something, it's easy enough to edit it out and say why. Or ask us to remove it. We respect polite requests and if we received one, we'd respect a DMCA takedown notice as well. We're after completely legitimate work.
Not a big deal, overall. Easy enough to handle and it's mostly picked up during the normal anti-vandalism watching that goes on.
Jamesday
Re:Exactly how big is this thing? (Score:5, Informative)
So, the full encylopedia would currently fit on a CD, but only the most current versions of each page. Bear in mind that's just the database dump though. If you wanted to pre-render it to HTML you'd probably need a lot more space, so it'd be simpler to just ship MySQL and a decent local web server on the CD.
Re:Size doesn't matters (Score:5, Informative)
In the 1950-ties, some got the weird idea that epicycles were added on epicycles throughout the middle ages. This was based on some very bad early research that historians of 1910 may have been aware of, but did not find worthy of elaborate comment.
Britannica was the publication that really took this to its extreme, at some point they wrote that 40-80 epicycles were added per planet! Not only is it horrendously wrong, it is completely absurd: Nobody in the middle ages had neither observational capacity nor the mathematical methods to deal with anything like that.
Britannica is largely to blame that this myth could get into university curriculums world-wide as an example of "ad hoc hypothesis gone wrong".
If you have a good research library available look for articles by Owen Gingerich on Ptolemy for details on this. The facts is that Ptolemy's system was hardly modified at all.
It was moderated in the 1980-ties, and the most horrendous claims were removed. Around 1995, I still found the articles lacking, as the gist of the articles were that the addition of epicycles was a good example of "ad hoc hypothesis gone wrong", and I exchanged a few e-mails with the editors about it.
It has been a few years since I last checked these articles, but last time I checked, they still did not reflect general consensus among contemporary historians.
So, it is very much reason to question articles you read in Britannica as well, not only Wikipedia. The bottom line is that critical reading of any source is a vital survival skill.
Hm, I'm wondering what Wikipedia has to say about this... Unfortunately, I don't have any time to kill. What am I doing on /.? ;-)
Re:Celebration! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Congrats! (Score:5, Informative)
Here are some very informative links (no surprises, I promise
Slashdot [wikipedia.org]
First posts and other trolls [wikipedia.org]
Hall of fame [wikipedia.org]
The coming of Evil [wikipedia.org]
A History lesson [wikipedia.org]
Slash and Burn [wikipedia.org]
On the AC [wikipedia.org]
More than just a discussion board [wikipedia.org]
Our fearless leader [wikipedia.org]
mod parent up (Score:5, Informative)
The best ways to help, without donating are:
Every article you contribute also adds to the wealth
Re:Er, What about E2? (Score:3, Informative)
Despite sucking all the fun out of noding, Everything is still fundamentally not built to become a useful reference like Wikipedia. The voting system only allows deletion, it's not nearly as powerful as a wiki for peer reviewing. Everything lacks Wikipedia's clear content guidelines and NPOV policy, so much of it is still subjective nonsense. I don't think it's very enlightened at all --- nowadays, Everything is neither fun (to me at least) nor useful.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
If you're using Mozilla/Firefox... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:One thing I've missed with Wikipedia... (Score:5, Informative)
There is verification. (Score:4, Informative)
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
And...? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Congrats! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:An 8 ton elephant? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Congrats! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Size doesn't matters (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Size doesn't matters (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Size doesn't matters (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wikipedia keymark (Score:3, Informative)
Much simplier if you ask me, and also faster.
Re:Funding - situation, what we spent the money on (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, we are planning to make it possible for people to have a small amounts automatically debited once a month.
Re:wiki = falsehoods? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Size doesn't matters (Score:3, Informative)
That being said, the article used to be [wikipedia.org] even worse for most of June.
Re:Why PHP? (Score:2, Informative)
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.