The world’s largest encyclopedia became the factual foundation of the web, but now it’s under attack.
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.
Not that California’s in the US
I like your attitude!
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.
I would love some of those less exciting times.
May you live in exciting times
Is the worst curse
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.
Wow, that took me over an hour to read, totally worth it!
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.
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
spoiler
Um, just in case, maybe spoiler that? It’s not like that first case was difficult to figure out, but still.
Edit: Fucking oops.
::: response to spoilers for danganronpa figure what out? all i see here is the hothead baseball player being a hothead :::
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.
Ah, shit.
No context = no spoiler
Says the rag that survives on drama
what did they ever do since the PC build guide?
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.
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.
Time for some encarta games
not everything has to be exciting, expanding, growing, “numbers go up” damnit.
Boring is ok for 95% of the things.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s the resiliency part of it all. Resistance to change is the security.
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.
And their merch is 🔥, just saying.
