Wikipedia: Size in volumes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes

by dpcx • 13 years ago

112 41 13 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

tty3• 13 years ago

Here's a comparison of all the versions of Wikipedia

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#All_Wikipe...

Take a look at the "depth" column. Dutch and Swedish used to be your average Wikipedias, with article counts somewhere in the ~500k. They both decided that it was more important to have a higher article count so they now employ bots to create new articles with the bare minimum of data (sentence or two, pulled from other language Wikipedias). It usually becomes more extreme when there's some sort of milestone ahead. There's even worse offenders, for example Waray-Waray.

I'm genuinely wondering whether Wikipedia should have a policy of deleting all such articles and disabling their creation. I don't think it's in the spirit of an encyclopedia.

baby• 13 years ago

I still think it's good because even if it doesn't provide good info, it links you to a list of articles in other languages that does. Providing you speak more than one language, it's very useful.

netrus• 13 years ago

Around 2006 my (German) high school teachers started to check Wikipedia articles for all essay topics they assigned. But they never checked the English or French articles. Good for me!

ronaldx2• 13 years ago

Looking at how they calculate "depth", I would say it's just as likely measuring edit-wars. It's not evident that it's measuring quality and I don't think it should be used as a target or marker for quality.

I often find myself clicking on the Dutch translation link - it regularly has more concise, useful data.

tty3• 13 years ago

I often find myself clicking on the Dutch translation link - it regularly has more concise, useful data.

For content that you care about, perhaps. Not for the content that they use to raise the article count number. The latter is mostly made up of one to two sentence articles scraped from foreign Wikipedias. Oftentimes they're articles about towns in remote countries.

Here's an example of such an article created by a bot

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitanti

simias3• 13 years ago

What's the incentive of artificially inflating the article count? Is it just a stupid race to be "on top"?

blowski• 13 years ago

Once the article is created, it can appear in Google. Once it's in Google, it's more likely to have visitors and some of them might improve the article.

I have no idea whether this was the rationale or even whether it's a good idea, but there might be more to their strategy than article count.

trycatch• 13 years ago

Partially it's just a stupid race, see e.g. page in Russian Wikipedia [1], completely dedicated to discussions of the "Wikipedias race", celebrating wins over other wikis, coordinating bot article creation, blaming competitors for "unfair" low-quality bot article uploads, etc. On the other hand, batch uploads are not completely useless -- batch-uploaded article stubs have consistent style, depth and quality (something that's hard to get with crowd-sourced articles), and with script-created articles it's possible to get exhaustive consistent coverage of boring topics like rivers, insects or villages.

[1] http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B1%D1%81%D1%83%D0%B6%... (title -- "Race")

Dosenpfand• 13 years ago

Dutch and Swedish used to be your average Wikipedias, with article counts somewhere in the ~500k. They both decided that it was more important to have a higher article count so they now employ bots to create new articles with the bare minimum of data (sentence or two, pulled from other language Wikipedias).

Interesting! The german wikipedia in comparison is doing the exact opposite and has very strict relevance criteria for new articles.

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=...

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=ht...

a3_nm• 13 years ago

I'm genuinely wondering whether Wikipedia should have a policy of deleting all such articles and disabling their creation. I don't think it's in the spirit of an encyclopedia.

Hopefully, it will soon be possible to generate such minimal articles automatically from the language-independent and structured data on Wikidata. At this point, hopefully, it will be possible to create just the stylesheets and get the data from Wikidata instead of populating small Wikipedias with bot-created articles; only the relevant work will remain (to be done on Wikidata in a language-independent way).

nemetroid• 13 years ago

This has worsened the "random article" feqture on Swedish Wikipedia by a lot. Try your luck, I bet you'll get a stub article about some insect:

http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Slumpsida

Regarding your suggestion: this is, after all, a decision made by the Swedish/Dutch Wikipedia community. I'm not familiar with Wikipedia's hierarchy, but I'm not sure that this is unencyclopaediac (?) enough for an outside intetvention to be a good idea.

dsschnau• 13 years ago

That's actually.. smaller than I would have thought.

gchokov• 13 years ago

Me too..

M2Ys4U• 13 years ago

Well it completely ignores formatting (lists, tables, headings etc.) and images, so if you were to account for those it would inflate a fair bit I would imagine.

buro9• 13 years ago

Ah, but that's answering quantitatively and most people would probably want any value question answered qualitatively.

ZeroMinx• 13 years ago

Latest what-if is relevant here;

Updating a Printed Wikipedia - http://what-if.xkcd.com/59/

dlhavema2• 13 years ago

dang someone already posted this.. I love that the main cost of printing/maintaining this would be the cost of the ink.

agumonkey• 13 years ago

What's scaring me is to imagine how many offices do run many printers continuously. And I thought investing in good LCD / software was expensive ..

ziko• 13 years ago

Sometimes when you look at similar graphics to this one, you go: "Wow, that's big."

Somehow, this wasn't one of those times. This one was: http://demonocracy.info/infographics/eu/debt_greek/debt_gree...

GotAnyMegadeth• 13 years ago

Good link, thanks

dlhavema2• 13 years ago

That is a really cool link, i especially like the page about gold.. crazy so much ( ~50% ) of the worlds gold is in jewelry..

ck2• 13 years ago

Can we do measurements in "library of congresses" yet?

It used to be a joke but if you can compare like this, you should be able to do a rough estimate of LoC ?

Dylan168072• 13 years ago

According to Wikipedia, the physical holdings of the Library of Congress total 33 million distinct books worth about 15 terabytes.

So quite a way to go from ~2k volumes.

yor• 13 years ago

It would be more useful to compare the LoC with the combined text, graphics, and other applicable media of every Wikimedia site.

Houshalter3• 13 years ago

I downloaded the entire English Wikipedia for offline use. There is some software available to render it, but it doesn't do images or a lot of the formatting. However it's still readable and when the internet is down, it's useful to have.

BrandonMarc• 13 years ago

How big is it, in terms of file size?

harshreality• 13 years ago

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#En...

pages-articles.xml.bz2 – Current revisions only, no talk or user pages. (This is probably the one you want. The size of the 4 April 2013 dump is approximately 9.06 GB compressed, 42 GB uncompressed)

bzip can be decompressed in chunks, can't it? I wonder if there's an app to read a compressed wikipedia xml archive on an ios or android tablet. Even better would be if it fetches missing resources (like embedded images) from the real wikipedia if there's internet access.

Houshalter3• 13 years ago

Almost 9 GB, though it's significantly smaller if you download the version without images (which my Wikipedia reader can't render anyways.) IIRC pure text is only like 2 GB.

There is a torrent for them somewhere.

As large as that is, I am surprised that it wasn't huger than that.

svag• 13 years ago

I believe the importance of Wikipedia is not so of how big it is, but how easily it's accessible (with no cost) and that the articles can be updated and be available almost instantly (in comparison with a hard copy encyclopedia).

rwg• 13 years ago

It seems strange to estimate when you could download Wikipedia's database dump, reformat the content in the same style as the Encyclopedia Britannica, and count how many pages/volumes you end up with.

ams6110• 13 years ago

I think it's strange (as in, unexpected) that the entirety of Wikipedia could fit on a set of shelves in one row at an average library. I would have thought it would be larger than that.

Wikipedia: Size in volumes

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