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The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- JBReefer 10y agoThis is so impressive, to see behind the curtains of what has become the central repository of humanities knowledge, during a moment of loss of one of humanity's greats.
- aaron695 10y ago> during a moment of loss of one of humanity's greats. Compared to, lets say Bill Gates who's saved millions of lives? Even artistically, I'm not sure Prince was up there in the top 1% The power of marketing.....
- todaysaccount 10y agoIf you're serious, do you genuinely believe you know what you're talking about?
- ams6110 10y agoPrince has provided millions (probably billions) of fans with moments of joy in their lives. The album "Purple Rain" pretty much was the bookmark of my freshman year at college. So many memories of that first year away from home come rushing back whenever I hear any of the songs from that album. I can vividly recall specific events, settings, and people for almost all of them, over three decades later. I never saw Prince live, but talking to people who did, he commanded the stage and the audience like few others. Without exception they describe him as one of the best live performers they have ever seen. I don't see why you bring up Bill Gates. His philanthropy is laudable and that stands on its own. I don't see how recognizing that Prince is probably up there with the best performing artists in human history takes anything away from that.
- quaristice 10y agoI totally agree with the sentiment of this comment (though I'm not sure how much marketing is involved.) Prince was very good at music and was, well, kind of a dick. I don't quite get the massive outpouring of grief that has ensued.
- ams6110 10y ago"Kind of a dick" I think could easily apply to Gates as well, no?
- quaristice 10y agoWell, I wasn't really responding to the Bill Gates part in particular. Gates was a bit of a megalomaniac with MS. But he's doing awesome stuff with the money now. As person I'm not aware of him ever being a jerk.
- michaelmrose 10y agoSo if you gain lots of money via semi nefarious means what fraction do you have to dedicate to good works before the earlier wrong is cancelled? I know that he didn't gas 6 million people but letting people buy their way out of moral debt with a fraction of the money they gained still seems horribly repugnant.
- anon4 10y agoHey, Hitler might have been responsible for killing a lot of people, including ones of Jewish faith, but he also killed Hitler. I think that makes him strictly a better person than Bill Gates. How many of us can say that we ended a world war?
- quaristice 10y agoFirst, what moral debt? Second, I imagine the sum total of his humanitarian efforts are greater than the total charity if all of those dollars remained in the pockets of each person who bought windows 95 et al. So repugnant seems like a real stretch.
- bubuga 10y agoWilliam Shakespear didn't saved as many lives as any physician of the time. Yet here we are, 400 years after his death, commemorating the man and his work. Different people contribute differently to the betterment of mankind. That doesn't mean some contributors need to be censored away from popular culture just because you perceive their contributions to be not as important as others'.
- ZeroGravitas 10y agoI agree with your point, though I think many physicians at the time of Shakespeare may actually have had a negative score when it came to saving lives. http://historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistoriesResponsive.asp?ParagraphID=kvb http://historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistoriesResponsive...
- dizzy3gg 10y agoJust lol. Blind comment. He played and produced his first album his self, all 27 instruments, all production, composition, arrangement. Pretty sure he was under 20 also. Sign o the Times, lyrically hits you like Bob Dylan. I'm not sure what makes an artist to you but Prince created some of the best art I've heard. But yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
- nymi 10y agoTake note Robots at Facebook and Google. Monetizing humanities information through ads is not the only way.
- conceit 10y ago> the central repository of humanities knowledge luckily, knowledge is decentralized
- cmdrfred 10y agoWhat happened at 7:15?
- chris_wot 10y agoI don't think WMF staff are credited enough for the work they do in keeping Wikipedia running. They seriously know how to scale, I think the only ones better than them are honestly Facebook and Twitter!
- zappo2938 10y agoCan't caching a page with varnish and memcache handle this?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nothrabannosir 10y agoThey cache the bejeezus out of their pages. Problems come up when a lot of people want to edit a page, an inherently uncacheable operation.
- fleitz 10y agoIt's possible to use stacks to 'cache' writes in scenarios like this. Writes to the same object go in the same stack, iterate over stacks, pop the first item, write it, clear the stack. It works miracles for ephemeral data like wikipedia edits. If you have extremely spikey load on servers, stacks are also a great replacement for queues, admit that during the deluge some portion of queries will timeout and go unanswered, instead of trying to process queries that are likely to timeout, simply process the first query on the stack and don't waste time processing the ones bound to fail.
- chris_wot 10y agoDoesn't caching writes from multiple different servers potentially cause consistency and durability concerns? I know MongoDB still haven't marked the bug [1] reported by Kyle Kingsbury [2] that found stale reads on all consistency and write concern levels... 1. https://jira.mongodb.org/plugins/servlet/mobile#issue/SERVER-17975 https://jira.mongodb.org/plugins/servlet/mobile#issue/SERVER... 2. https://aphyr.com/posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-reads https://aphyr.com/posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-reads
- Buge 10y agoInteresting how in the graph it looks like some people found out about 25 minutes before it was more publicly found out.
- CaptSpify 10y agoI wonder if there's a crossover between celebrity reporters, and people who update Wikipedia on celebrities?
- fineIllregister 10y agoI don't know the exact timeline, but my understanding is that there were reports of a death in the area where Prince lived before it was known that it was Prince.
- The_ed17 10y agoI found a few references to stories about a 'medical situation' at Paisley Park that came out before TMZ's report—I'm assuming it was those reports.
- erelde 10y agoI'm seeing an exponential curve, isn't it what we should expect ?
- duskwuff 10y agoLook very closely at the section of the graph starting around 4:20 PM. There's a small but significant increase in hits before the big spike starts around 4:50. It's easier to see on the full resolution graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Prince_article_minute_by_minute_en.wikipedia_page_views.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Prince_a...
- sigmar 10y ago16:49 UTC refers to when TMZ first reported Prince died. Prior to that, there had been plenty of reports that there were ambulances at Paisley Park. It is not strange that people would google either "paisley park" or "prince" and then follow the results to Prince's wiki page.
- tgb 10y ago"He was ... known for, among many other things, ... a performance at Super Bowl XLI in a raining downpour in front of over a hundred million people." Typo and/or I call bullshit.
- Karunamon 10y agoThat's actually spot on if you count the TV viewing audience - 112M people as of the 2014 event.
- dtparr 10y agoThat presumably includes the television audience.
- Amorymeltzer 10y agoThis[1] seems to indicate viewership of the halftime show peaked at 140M. 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20090412054158/http://www.suntimes.com/sports/football/bears/243107,CST-FTR-super05.article https://web.archive.org/web/20090412054158/http://www.suntim...
- tgb 10y agoOkay, I can see where you're coming from but the sentence was "raining downpour in front of over a hundred million people." How does that NOT imply a live audience of a hundred million? I can't believe people are downvoting me for this. The sentence is absurd as written.
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoFor others who were left scratching their heads at what exactly this pop-sci-explained PoolCounter mechanism actually is: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/PoolCounter https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/PoolCounter TL;DR: It's a limiter on how many workers start rendering the new page version when the old page version in cache has been invalidated.
- zatkin 10y ago+1 for whoever named it the "Michael Jackson problem". I'm going to start using that if I ever encounter the same issue myself.
- encoderer 10y agoIs this not the thundering herd problem?
- gerry_shaw 10y agoAs I understand it yes, but I think the "Micheal Jackson problem" is a better name.
- techdragon 10y agoIt's a cute name but there is existing Research that relates to this issue which calls it "the thundering herd problem" so I would recommend the one you can actually search for without problems.
- yrro 10y agoWho?
- bubuga 10y ago> Is this not the thundering herd problem? There's a wikipedia article on the thundering herd problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem The article needs a little love, though.
- EugeneOZ 10y agoEven in peak it's just ~800 hits per second - it shows how is irrelevant the C10k problem (yes, I know it's not exactly about hits per second, but still).
- tim333 10y agoC10k doesn't come up with Wikipedia because it doesn't do websockets. If it did it would probably have millions of concurrent connections, far over 10k. I dare say 10k is a bit passe. Whatsapp can apparently do 2m/server.
- Cyph0n 10y ago2m per second? These guys must have squeezed every ounce of performance out of Beam.
- js2 10y ago2m refers to concurrent connections, not rate.
- Cyph0n 10y agoAh, that makes sense. Still, is 2m rps within the realm of possibility for BEAM with a high-end server grade processor and heavy use of actors/concurrency?
- RobertKerans 10y agoThe Phoenix framework tests in October got up to 2m concurrent active (well, mostly just awake) connections, without timeouts. http://www.phoenixframework.org/blog/the-road-to-2-million-websocket-connections http://www.phoenixframework.org/blog/the-road-to-2-million-w...
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- yeukhon 10y agoThey mentioned 5M views within 24 hours of Michael Jackson's death. With over 3B Internet users out there, I am actually a little surprised how small the spike was. Did they only count English Wikipedia? Even so I am quite surprised. I would expect 10-20M at least. Similarly, many young people like myself have never heard of Prince, I had to look him up to find out who he truly was.
- sparkzilla 10y agoJust out of interest, did you go directly to Wikipedia to find the information, or did you go to Google, which then led you to Wikipedia?
- yeukhon 10y agoAlways Google, which leads me to Wikipedia. Almost literally every time...
- cooper12 10y agoThey recently overhauled it, [0] but back then the pageviews [1] wouldn't count mobile users. You can see the old stats for Jackon's page here: http://stats.grok.se/en/200906/Michael%20Jackson http://stats.grok.se/en/200906/Michael%20Jackson. The actual number is 5,875,404 views within that day (in whichever time zone) and is for the English version of the article specifically. [0]: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/12/14/pageview-data-easily-accessible/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/12/14/pageview-data-easily-a... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pageview_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pageview_statistics
- yeukhon 10y agoThanks. Yeah, I think mobile viewer would be a substainal amount, but desktop user count is still below my personal expectation. We are talking about 850M English speaking Internet users :( only 6M page view within 24 hours is really quite low.
- SmellyGeekBoy 10y ago
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- msdos 10y agoPrince, Wikipedia web hits: https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/#project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&start=2016-04-12&end=2016-04-22&pages=Prince_(musician) https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/#project=en.wikipedia.or... David Bowie, Wikipedia web hits: https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/#project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&start=2016-01-01&end=2016-01-22&pages=David_Bowie https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/#project=en.wikipedia.or...
- xrstf 10y agoFinally a replacement for "Site got slashdotted": "Site got Prince'd". I like it.
- kingsleymani 10y agoJudge: Pats fans' Deflategate suit 'without merit' see more infor here http://sh.st/IGVR3 http://sh.st/IGVR3
- lordnacho 10y agoHow are Wikipedia articles kept consistent with each other? Say someone like Prince dies. His page will instantly change, seemingly while his portrait is still in the sky and the cannon fires. But with certain people there's a variety of connected items that need referential integrity. For instance, I can imagine Prince being on one of those lists (eg highest grossing) that has bold text for still living artist. For office holders, they need to be moved from "incumbent" to a box with dates and the new incumbent needs to be updated. And then there's text snippets that are in present tense ("Prince and David Bowie are among the greatest living artists"). And then there's the corresponding pages in other languages. How's it done?
- CydeWeys 10y ago> How are Wikipedia articles kept consistent with each other? They aren't. There is no transactional/referential integrity on Wikipedia. When someone famous dies a pretty common pattern is that first the death date is added, and then in a later subsequent edit someone gets around to changing the present tense verbs into past tense verbs ("Prince is a singer..." --> "Prince was a singer..."). I can tell you all about how category normalization is maintained, though. It starts with this process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_discu...
- nullc 10y agoSome material like that is generated by templates, so updating the templates updates it in many places. A lot, however, is just done manually by the armies of volunteers that contribute to the site. More than a few people specialize in updating bits of minutia like that.