this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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The world’s largest encyclopedia became the factual foundation of the web, but now it’s under attack.

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Wow, that took me over an hour to read, totally worth it!

[–] enbiousenvy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 22 points 12 hours ago

not everything has to be exciting, expanding, growing, "numbers go up" damnit.

[–] sirico@feddit.uk 2 points 7 hours ago

Time for some encarta games

[–] brem@sh.itjust.works 29 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

Boring is subjective.

For me, Wikipedia is a joyful wealth of knowledge & collective factual editing in one of the most responsible executions expected of such a format.

If we're being subjective; knowledge is hella fun, yo.

[–] Tw1light@lemmy.world 20 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

just reminding everyone, one donation to wikipedia will hurt leon's ego. if you want to help a free source of info with no ads, consider donating

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 5 points 16 hours ago (1 children)
[–] burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (2 children)

spoilerUm, just in case, maybe spoiler that? It's not like that first case was difficult to figure out, but still.

Edit: Fucking oops.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 7 hours ago

No context = no spoiler

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 7 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

::: response to spoilers for danganronpa figure what out? all i see here is the hothead baseball player being a hothead :::

[–] Focal@pawb.social 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I agree here. I'm looking forward to playing these games myself, but I didn't even consider it being a possible spoiler before the other person mentioned it.

[–] Croquette@sh.itjust.works 10 points 16 hours ago

Boring is ok for 95% of the things.

[–] Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 4 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Says the rag that survives on drama

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

what did they ever do since the PC build guide?

[–] Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago

Individually, not much. Journalism as a profession, however, has been not so slowly transitioning to sensationalism in lieu of a "just the facts, folks" methodology. Thats what I call living on drama.

[–] OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 31 points 1 day ago (2 children)

How do you download the entire Wikipedia? Someone said it was possible to host it and also resources for Anna's archive and other archive sites.

[–] nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 30 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

downloading it is fine but i think the contents of wikipedia are so thoroughly archived that i doubt it is in danger of becoming "lost media".

my fear isn't that the information would be destroyed, but that the ongoing project of keeping the knowledge up to date would stop, or be split across some underground efforts with varying quality standards.

[–] dwzap@lemmy.world 31 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Apps such as https://kiwix.org/ uses the data dumps regularly made available by the Wikimedia Foundation at https://dumps.wikimedia.org/.

The entire Wikipedia might be large, especially with images, but e.g English Wikipedia without images is a couple of 10s of GB.

[–] oce@jlai.lu 11 points 1 day ago

As of 7 September 2025, there are 7,052,247 articles in the English Wikipedia containing over 4.9 billion words (giving a mean of about 706 words per article). The total number of pages is 63,983,130. Articles make up 11.02 percent of all pages on Wikipedia. As of 16 October 2024, the size of the current version including all articles compressed is about 24.05 GB without media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

The following graphic illustrates how large the English Wikipedia might be if the articles (without images and other multimedia content) were to be printed and bound in book form with a format similar to Encyclopædia Britannica. Each volume is assumed to be 25 cm (9.8 in) tall, 5 cm (2.0 in) thick, and containing 1,600,000 words or 8,000,000 characters. The size of this illustration is based upon the live article count manually adjusted by the average word count on an irregular basis on a user subpage of the graphic's creator Tompw. The growth rate is approximately one full volume every three days if the increase in average article size isn't accounted for over time. The print volumes as shown in the illustration would take up just over 9.34 m3 (330 cu ft) in total volume.

[–] AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 232 points 1 day ago (18 children)

Great article, would highly recommend anyone with the time give it a full read through.

Wikipedia is incredibly valuable, and insanely well edited and put together, and we're all lucky to have something like it available for free.

CONTINUE READING WITH A VERGE SUBSCRIPTION AND SUCK MY FAT COCK

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[–] balder1991@lemmy.world 29 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

“One of the things I really love about Wikipedia is it forces you to have measured, emotionless conversations with people you disagree with in the name of trying to construct the accurate narrative,”

Yeah, I think what makes Wikipedia resilient is that you can’t just go there and say something subjective. You need to find the correct way to state the actual fact, even when it can have different interpretations. Cause that way, no group can contest it.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 19 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Or they'll just declare it non-notable and speedily delete it. They've lost so many newcomers to internal bullshit like that.

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

It's not internal bullshits, it's whether there's enough neutral-schoursches-to-schoursche-its. That's all Notability's about.

It has a really bad name though, that guideline. I was a part of the editors who wanted to change it to "suitability" but there's the resiliency.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 3 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

Oh no, I once had an article I contributed removed for exactly that, notability. Not sourcing or lack thereof. That was also the last time I ever contributed, obviously.

It didn't help that a couple years later somebody else decided it was notable after all and created the article.

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 4 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Notability is sourcing: Articles generally require significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the topic. They even made a catchy name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_answer_to_life,_the_universe,_and_everything (well they borrowed it but you catch my drift). Even if every single claim is Verifiable, it will be deleted if there aren't enough secondary (independent of the topic) sources because it's dangerous and likely non-neutral to only hear the subject's view of themselves. Confusing Notability with something else is a pretty common pitfall for new article creators, so there's things like "Articles for creation" where you can submit article drafts for review and have conversations with the reviewer on what exactly is wrong with your article, as well as many other guides and forums like Help:Your first article, WP:Teahouse, and WP:Help desk.

It didn't help that a couple years later somebody else decided it was notable after all and created the article.

The essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Too_soon is often cited to say "This might get the needed sourcing in a few years, but right no we can't tell, so it's better to create the article again when it has what's needed to align with our content guidelines rather than rush to make a misleading one right now." So either that's exactly what your situation was, or . I'd love to take a look at the article you're talking about.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

It was about Leeroy Jenkins. Yes, I'm old. No, it wasn't about reliable sources or neutrality. It was literally because a bunch of folk decided it wasn't important enough to be immortalised in Wikipedia. It was very much reflective of the bias of the editors at the time.

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 5 points 14 hours ago

Ooh, creating that article's a lifetime achievement!

Looking at the deletion discussion, I see why you would think everyone only looked at the fame, but none of the article's citations such as "Leeroy/Mortal Kombat Techno Remix" could've shown that it was actually a meme beyond someone's personal character. One editor mentioned hardly finding any Leeroy Jenkins results from Google back then, let alone reliable sources. I have to admit there were definitely some !votes that didn't look for sourcing, though It doesn't help that the article did look like something some random guy created for their OC:

Comically offsetting his ham-handed actions, which led directly to the disgraceful slaughter of his entire group, Leeroy is shown with exhibiting machismo [...]

Anyways, just five months later a year-old editor with just over 200 edits made a draft with plenty of good sourcing and took it to WP:DeletionReview, and everyone agreed it was notable enoug.

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[–] Gsus4@mander.xyz 117 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Good science is boring, good politics is boring, good espionage is boring, good journalism is boring, good history is boring, good banking is boring, good business is boring. Entertainment serves us this pop view of the world...

But wikipedia is more valuable than all the LLM slop machines combined.

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[–] Sunshine@piefed.ca 46 points 1 day ago (27 children)

Move the operations to Denmark. Florida is a fascist sinking state.

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