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."
Funding? (Score:5, Interesting)
Goverment Funding (Score:5, Interesting)
If I ever get the time I'd love to compile an easy to use CD/DVD containing an entire copy of the current WikiPedia. Then you could make copies and give them away free at Libraries and such.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
And of course, dont forget... (Score:5, Interesting)
An amazing "encyclopedia" indeed (Score:1, Interesting)
Crushing by elephant is fun, but what other dictionary has a huge article on worldwide contemporary pornography.... [wikipedia.org]
did you know: "Pornography in the United States tends to feature mostly blonde women with large breasts (usually augmented by breast implants) and buttocks and often with tattoos or body piercing. Men in pornography tend to be older and heavily muscled. American pornography movies often attempt to promote pornographic stars, and the boxes for video tapes tend to be extremely gaudy. Plot in pornographic movies is often minimal."
Its great to hava an encyclopedia you can quote from withoud worries of the BSA [wikipedia.org] knoking down your door. There is ofcourse a slightly cheaper alternative [everything2.net]. If you see EDB, dont panic!
100,000 articles in 6 months (Score:1, Interesting)
(if my math is any good) thats over 550 articles per day and that number can only increase as more and more people find out about it (thus begin to contribute yet more articles on a regular basis).
Just goes to show how much we can get done when we work together on projects such as this.
BTW you can always chat with the brains behind the operation if you have any questions or comments, at irc.freenode.net #wikipedia
to my friends at wikipedia i would just like to say, "Keep up the good work"
Re:Goverment Funding (Score:2, Interesting)
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEH_Reference_
it's an application for a grant from a govt. agency.
Copyright (Score:5, Interesting)
Watch the slashdot effect live (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedia needs donations [wikimediafoundation.org] to stay alive.
Re:Size doesn't matters (Score:1, Interesting)
the difference is an Open Source, free (and free)(tm) reference that you can contribute to as a user, as compared to Closed Source (propriotary) copyright protected, expensive, reference who is written by a company who may or may not have a point of view to push of their own.
given the choices i would rather consider the Open Alternative as more credible considering any person ON EARTH who has knowledge on the subject is welcome to contribute to any given respective article, rather than put my faith in some Large company to get the "facts" strait on their own. but that is just me.
Re:Size doesn't matters (Score:4, Interesting)
Random page (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage [wikipedia.org]
This shows a random Wikipedia page each time I open a new browser window. Often you can read about very interesting things.
IPv6 agains slashdotting (Score:1, Interesting)
Slashdotting would then be a good thing as requests for the same page would come at the same time and you can server thousands with just dozens of actual pages being broadcast.
Now if only all IPv4 providers would have IPv6 drop in points even the backbone would not see any increase if some static page is requested by many many users.
Browsers should get some smart caching though 'sorry this is just a small site, requests for downloading my page / shareware will be broadcast on the hour'. Everybody could serve!
Dennis SCP
Exactly how big is this thing? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Size doesn't matters (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Big Deal! (Score:3, Interesting)
This is one of the hidden beauty of Wikipedia.
Wikibooks (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Wikipedia as a new mode of knowledge (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Goverment Funding (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Funding? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Size doesn't matters (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipedia scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two ways: first, it is slightly cheaper, and second, it has the words 'Welcome to Wikipedia' printed in large friendly letters on the cover.
Moreover, where Britannica will give a biochemical description of alcohol, Wikipedia will tell you what the best drink in existence is, where the best ones are mixed, how much you can expect to pay and what voluntary organisations exist to help you rehabilitate afterwards. Oh, and even how to make one yourself.
Seriously, though: take a clamshell PDA, a wireless connection and set Wikipedia to be your homepage, and write 'Don't Panic' on the cover. Another SF fantasy becomes real...
Re:Congrats! (Score:3, Interesting)
I only took Jihad as an example because it is a fairly charged word which may easily provoke emotional response. My concern with Wikipedia is that the definitions of words about which entrants have strong feelings will not be entirely balanced.
memory leak ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Er, What about E2? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Size doesn't matters (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone with a doctorate dealing with genomic evolution in microorganisms, I have to say that at least the scientific articles in Wikipedia seem to be reasonably balanced and competently written -- and reasonably up-to-date as well.
Quite often in commercial encyclopedias the articles are quite biased and out-of-date because they are written by a single, well known old guy in the appropriate field, and as Max Planck said, a new idea in science doesn't generally win by converting its opponents -- rather the old opponents die and the new scientific generation is comfortable with the new idea from the start...
Filler census information (Score:3, Interesting)
Makes browsing with Random hard when you keep on getting statistics and nothing else on endless lists of towns.
Re:Er, What about E2? (Score:4, Interesting)
For instance, compare the Everything2 page on Water (I can't link to it, for some reason the site uses HTTP POST for identifying which article you want) to the the wikepedia one [wikipedia.org].
I find the wikipedia article much more clearly structured, more informative, and I think more authoratitive. Although only the Everything2 article contains an ASCII-art rendering of the Kanji character for water.
Re:Size doesn't matters (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Funding - situation, what we spent the money on (Score:1, Interesting)
What about placing GoogleAds in every page?
The small little boxes of text ads could endup being also informative, and add contents instead of subtracting space to it; and they have minimal bandwidth hit.
With 300.000 pages of definitions, and many many visitors every day, I think this could generate quite a lot of free $.
N.B. Note that I don't know the inner workings of the Wikipedia projects very well, so maybe there are some idelogical rules that deny this possibility. Sorry in advance for that, if that's the case.
Bye!
Love wikipedia... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [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 [mediawiki.org], the software used by Wikipedia, and setup VagueWare.com [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.
Wiki, I spam therefore I am (Score:3, Interesting)
We live in the Post Editorial Age whereby any nugglet of infotainment is accepted as truth and fact and no one need rely on fact checkers, editors or referees that ensure that revisionism doesn't take precident over truth. So if I round up 10,000 of my closest net friends and I convince them to agree to say that say something then it pretty much becomes fact.
Eventually the internet will be a weapon for tyranny.
Re:Congrats! (Score:3, Interesting)
Ironically, this genius probably thinks that he's making a statement for tolerance, open-mindedness and understanding.
Anyway.
A few years ago, one of the Wikipedia heads posted a rather pompous writeup to Kuro5hin, asking in the faux-question style we frequently see in Ask Slashdots, "How can the Wikipedia system work? Why isn't it full of crap?" In fact, at the time it was almost entirely full of crap and I told him so. He responded graciously, telling me to check back in a few years.
A few years later, they've really done a terrific, terrific job, and I want to tell them that, also!
Re:memory leak ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Too late (Score:1, Interesting)
Too late... [georgewbush.com]
Re:Size doesn't matters (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, as a Canadian I am deeply interested in the War of 1812 and its effects on the formation of my country. The latest Wikipedia article on the subject contains a much more balanced perspective on the war than most other 'summary' accounts, and represents new thinking/interpretation of the war that is coming into vogue over the past decade or so.
At this point I have a much greater degree of respect for the Wikipedia than i do for 'dead tree' accounts. The oraganic, evolving nature of the content is a much more representative to the nature of intellectual discourse, debate, and socratic thinking IMHO.
ability to edit pages (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Size doesn't matters (Score:2, Interesting)
wiki = falsehoods? (Score:3, Interesting)
In the Puerto Rico entry it says that Puerto Ricans dont pay federal taxes, that is simply not true. There is no separate federal taxation category for Puerto Ricans. What is true is that income earned in puerto rico by pays no federal taxes.
The entry also says that only 20% of puerto ricans decend from blacks which is a lie. Immigration from europe and slaves brough from africa accounted for almost 100% of the population and it was about 50-50 white and black. The article instead says that 60% of the population can claim amerindian descent. THat is bullshit. the indians in puerto rico were killed in practically less than a generation. that is why they started bringing black slave in the first place.
Re:Goverment Funding (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, they generally don't, although they might try anyway.
You'd be surprised how little say government sometimes has. Cases involving the National Endowment of the Arts are the classic example of this. The controversy usually works like this:
1. They give a grant to an artist, a grant that (contrary to popular belief) does not and can not specify much of anything about the work to be produced
2. The artist produces something that's just shocking, shocking!
3. Politicians try to tighten the screws and specify what can and can't be produced with these grants, since people are using the money to product things that are just shocking, shocking!
4. Courts tell the lawmakers that they can't specify precisely what is to be done with NEA grant money for the arts, since it's an infringement of the constitutional right to free speech
Even the surpreme court has done this. It is counterintuitive at first, since you think of the government as having a lot of say about this sort of thing.
Re:Size doesn't matters (Score:3, Interesting)
How do you help them? (Score:3, Interesting)
BTW, I usually hate shit work, but I'm willing to spend some time lending a hand with WikiPedia. I spend all day thinking hard (chip design), and so for this, simply because I have the skill set, I'm willing to do some things thta don't require as much thought.
Re:Wiki, I spam therefore I am (Score:3, Interesting)
My understanding is that at the time, people with an education happened to participate in whatever behaviours we now find abhorrent just as much as everyone else.
Witch burning? Encouraged by the clergy, who at the time often had the best access to education.
Nazis? Some very prominent, respected, intelligent Germans were Nazis. Many went along just because the neck that sticks out gets cut off; some thought the Nazi party would be good for the country--stick it to those dirty Jews and all. Resistance to the Nazi regime came from all classes and all levels of education--we only hear about the most notable intellectuals, but for every Einstein there are probably thousands of Jan Schmidts that nobody ever heard of.
Slavery? Who owned slaves? Hint: it wasn't the poor. Slaves were owned by individuals with access to money. Usually, access to money also meant access to education. Twelve of the first twenty U.S. Presidents owned slaves; eight while they held the office. Was Washington a 'real moron', too? Thomas Jefferson was one of the largest slaveowners in Virginia.
For articles on political or social policy and commentary, the 'educated' are often capable only of more eloquent, complex, and pretentious wrongheadedness.
For articles with scientific content, I'd rather see an article that was produced from the work of several expert contributors than just one. Really, anybody could attempt an addition to an article on genetics, but the weak stuff would likely get wiped right out again. The people who are likely to contribute to scientific articles are generally experts. In my experience they like to share their expertise. As a matter of principle, I can also see them aggressively repairing factual errors, and updating material to reflect current thought--something that the dead tree encyclopedias just don't have the time, expertise, or will to do.
Re:Size doesn't matters (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Er, What about E2? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wiki tends to produce a more encyclopedia-like database, because there is a single article per page. E2 is a harder read because there are multiple writeups per node. It's also kind of a drag that you can't use images on E2 but I think that it enforces a kind of informational purity. It doesn't make the content any more correct, but if you care about the quality of your writeups, you end up being forced to give complete descriptions. There is no relying on "see picture below". You can draw some ASCII art but it's of only limited use for diagrams. (See for example my writeup on double wishbone suspension [everything2.com].) Actually, I do consider the lack of images to be E2's single greatest failing, because ascii art actually makes the page less readable on small devices and in text browsers.
Regardless, I have chosen E2 because I want my writeups to exist as independent entities. I don't want some choad overwriting my changes, even if they are right and I am wrong. I want them to notify me of my error, and then I want to change it, because I want to learn from it.
Personally I think the solution is to play the two sites off one another. E2 has a lot of great content. Wikipedia has the most immediately useful content. The two go together like peanut butter and strawberry jam.
Re:Celebration! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:You are the answer... (Score:3, Interesting)
Essentially, whatever your supposed need to have the "product" of an "expert reviewed" free encyclopaedia, you are essentially proposing what can be thought of as immoral slacking in your reply to my reply -- by proposing the primacy of your desire to be a "user" with rights to free stuff and not the need to also be a "citizen" with obligations to help with quality and quantity of free stuff. So, you appear to claim rights without responsibilities [civiced.org]. That is just not a defensible moral position (obviously it might be defensible, say, militarily for a time, if you can use the threat of force to get people to work for you for free as slaves). The net needs more "citizens" (or netizens) and less "users", IMHO. Look at, say, James P. Hogan's sci-fi novel _Voyage From Yesteryear_ [jamesphogan.com] to see the difference in attitude and what it means for humanity. Or, look at the culture of some of the Native People of the Americas who believed in universal abundance and a gift economy (before Western militarism and bioterorrism and corporatism took its toll).
To soften this criticism, I'll say I am guilty of it too sometimes -- I haven't added anything to Wikipedia though I use it sometimes (although I have occasionally been thinking about how to make it peer to peer). You or the original poster may well make wonderful contributions to other projects like FreeBSD and have a fair argument to expect high quality in others free work in exchange for yours.
Another deeper point is that the notion of an "encyclopedia" is to an extent a farce anyway -- it is just a sampling of all human knowledge and experience based on what the editors given their own biases could pay for and fit into a few dozen printed volumes. Wikipedia is one example of something so much greater. Beyond some basics, and even there sometimes, "accurate information" is a very subjective and problematical concept, at the very least because all information is subject to interpretation and context and selection (e.g. will an article on "red shift" discuss Halton Arp [haltonarp.com]?), whereas collaboration is almost universally a good thing. A lot of experts have econmic reasons to give out poor answers and not challenge the academic status-quo and related dogmas. See for example Kicking the Sacred Cow: Questioning the Unquestionable and Thinking the Impermissible [jamesphogan.com]. He makes the point that engineering (like a bridge) ultimately works to fill a need or doesn't -- but science itself (or expert opinion) can end up becoming self-perpetuating dogma.
We may just have to agree to disagree here. Also, a better overall net system (or Google) woudl make it easy to find the original poster's criticism of the Puerto Rico article, making this argument moot as the new information might in the future be integrated by the original act of posting the ciriticism on a web site like Slashdot.