I'm sure beer pong is much more exciting than Wikipedia. At least you're numb from the drinking and laughing at your own stupidity, even though I do that while reading Wikipedia as well.
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
830 points (98.7% liked)
Technology
74944 readers
2816 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
not everything has to be exciting, expanding, growing, "numbers go up" damnit.
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.
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
Wow, that took me over an hour to read, totally worth it!
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
And their merch is 🔥, just saying.
Where are the [citation needed] stickers, though?
They used to sell those on the xkcd store and I was going to link to them but it seems the store is closed now.
sigh [citation needed]
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Boring is ok for 95% of the things.
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.
"When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all."
load more comments
(2 replies)
Time for some encarta games
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Or they'll just declare it non-notable and speedily delete it. They've lost so many newcomers to internal bullshit like that.
load more comments
(6 replies)
Move the operations to Denmark. Florida is a fascist sinking state.
WMF has been headquartered in San Francisco since 2007, with chapters and data centers around the world. Not that California's in the US, but much better than Florida.
I hate to say it, but I don't think Wikipedia is as neutral or as open as it claims to be. Some of the article comments talk about there definitely being some bias against anonymous editors, even if they're correct.
I'm not sure if it was in that article or in another comment section, but someone said after Elon Musk did the Nazi salute at Trump's event, an anonymous user mentioned it and there was a big controversy. And a registered user took it down and berated them for it, and another registered user came along an added the salute info back in and it was fine. Or something like that.
I definitely still think Wikipedia is a net good. But it seems to me any time you have a centralised source of information, a small group of people will fight to control the narrative so they can spin it any which way they want. For example, on Reddit, my favorite band's unofficial subreddit is run by a guy who bans any fan cams of the events — unless they're his. So obviously he does fan cams so he can make ad money on YouTube, but he uses Reddit to block those of others to direct the traffic to his. I think Fandom (the shitty wiki site with all the ads) run a lot of gaming communities, again, to drive ad revenue. Lot of that shit going on. I mean, if they tried that on Lemmy, someone could just open a community on another instance and the users could then decide who they want to support.
Is Wikipedia susceptible to that kind of influence? Of course it is. And I worry about it being taken over by the wrong people. I don't think that has happened yet, but I've seen it happen on other sites.
To be clear, we should definitely support Wikipedia against the alt right, but we should also be cautious that they, and other bad actors, don't destroy its credibility from within. Yes, the alt right has their own Wikipedia (Conservapedia or something like that) but that's not good enough, they want ours to be theirs, too.
load more comments
(8 replies)
view more: next ›