6 ms·

Part of the value of Encarta was in the human curation of what was interesting. Wikipedia includes (by necessity) everything — but an encyclopedia would probab

by jxf 6y ago

Part of the value of Encarta was in the human curation of what was interesting. Wikipedia includes (by necessity) everything — but an encyclopedia would probably devote more space to (say) Nigerian history than to (say) the in-game statistics of all ~1,000 Pokémon.

p1necone 6y ago
I suspect the sort of person who writes Wikipedia articles about Pokemon would not go and write articles about Nigerian history instead if Pokemon articles were not allowed, and vice versa. Wikipedia contributions are not really a zero sum game.
- patrec 6y ago
  Well, for storage (and thus offline) purposes it is of course exactly a zero sum game. I for one would really like a say 3 GiB version of English Wikipedia without Pokemon and Porn, or a 33GiB version with useful images. However broad and non-deltionist might be best for online Wikepedia, a more curated i.e. deletionist version would certainly be very useful for offline usage and quite a few other purposes.
  - exDM69 6y ago
    > I for one would really like a say 3 GiB version of English Wikipedia without Pokemon and Porn, or a 33GiB version with useful images. There are several offline snapshots of different sizes of Wikipedia that do exactly this. Some of them are more thoroughly curated, others are a snapshot of the most popular articles, etc. What I could not find easily was a full English Wikipedia with images and all available in an easily accessible format (like the Kiwix snapshots). I'd put a whole hard disk for this purpose, because the size is in the gigabyte-terabyte range.
    - asah 6y ago
      Some relevant links: 100,000 curated pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Level/5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Level... In terms of space, the text is over 1000x smaller than the multimedia: ~20GB (uncompressed) for the text vs ~45TB (compressed) for multimedia (est accounting for growth vs 23TB@2014). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
    - monort 6y ago
      What's wrong with kiwix snapshot of English wikipedia? It's only 93GB. http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2020-09.zim http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_all_max...
      - patrec 6y ago
        Well, I was hoping for less than 93GiB compressed, given that this exceeds the storage capacity of several devices I'd like to use it on and I'd estimate the total amount of info I care about to be far smaller than that. And small is beautiful: if everything fits into ram, you can do various interesting data munging tasks on the data (which is after all not uninteresting) very quickly.
    - patrec 6y ago
      I am aware that there are various offline wikipedia compilations and I am grateful they exist and to the people who work on them, but last I looked using them looked like a bit of pain, and on checking again that still appears to be the case. I get the impression that if I want to have something of decent quality that fits into the 10s of GiB range I'd consider reasonable¹, I'd have to manually munge together several non-Pokemon topics I consider important plus one of the text only dumps. This would be more palatable if I had a strong impression that once I hit upon a working process I could rinse-and-repeat on a yearly basis. Do you have any experience with this? ¹E.g. the 100k top article page linked by sibling does not look super promising, ~700 math articles vs ~10k fluff (sports, entertainment etc.).
      - exDM69 6y ago
        I have the ~80GB "full english" snapshot I grabbed some time ago and use with Kiwix. It's not quite "full", it doesn't have quite all images and video, etc. But the size is still reasonable for a desktop/laptop PC. I also have a 10GB snapshot on my phone, but it's a bit lacking. I don't have enough storage on my phone to fit the bigger one. But a battery powered offline Wikipedia is high on my list of necessary things in case things go south. I haven't found a great way to keep these synced up, glad to hear if someone has a good solution for up-to-date offline wikipedia.
  - swiley 6y ago
    Meh. Even my phone can store the entire text of English Wikipedia and still have half the storage left over for sloppy OS and App code.
- quietbritishjim 6y ago
  I think the point was that if you are looking at a subject where the relative importance is less obvious than Pokemon vs Nigerian politics then you could gauge importance implicitly from the existence of the article in a curated encyclopedia - not that contributers should be forced to spend more time on more important topics.
- mekkkkkk 6y ago
  If they were employed to do so, they would. A curated encyclopedia with paid researchers would not be bound by the whims of weebs.
29athrowaway 6y ago
Some people call this phenomenon "wikigroaning": "the art of highlighting Wikipedia's bias toward things that don't matter". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikigroaning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikigroaning https://www.somethingawful.com/news/wikigroaning/ https://www.somethingawful.com/news/wikigroaning/
- wishysgb 6y ago
  I just don't get why doesn't it matter . for what it is Pokemon is a game and in some ways a form of art, and since many humans are interested in it deeply that means that it is important to them. I think it is important human knowledge, there is no need to be elitest about it.
  - 29athrowaway 6y ago
    Some pokemons are inspired in real world animals. Many people know the pokemon and not the animal. They know about drowzee but not about the tapir.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
And yet there's a ton of information that is rejected from Wikipedia itself, which found a place on e.g. Wikia and a few other sites like that - mainly about gaming, but also about subjects like D&D, etc.
- musicale 6y ago
  If Bulbasaur is on Wikipedia, then Owlbear should be also. ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owlbear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owlbear
ben_w 6y ago
I remember a similar comparison with Tony Blair back when he was the Prime Minister of the UK; the response was that while Wikipedia did indeed say more about Pikachu than Blair, Wikipedia also said more about Blair than did whichever “proper” encyclopaedia Wikipedia was being compared with at the time.
- musicale 6y ago
  Well, Pikachu has been a highly influential Pokémon for nearly 30 years.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
I recall reading that there was a time the Wikipedia article on the lightsaber was longer than the article on the printing press. No longer the case, thankfully.

by jxf 6y ago

p1necone 6y ago

I suspect the sort of person who writes Wikipedia articles about Pokemon would not go and write articles about Nigerian history instead if Pokemon articles were not allowed, and vice versa. Wikipedia contributions are not really a zero sum game.

patrec 6y ago
Well, for storage (and thus offline) purposes it is of course exactly a zero sum game. I for one would really like a say 3 GiB version of English Wikipedia without Pokemon and Porn, or a 33GiB version with useful images. However broad and non-deltionist might be best for online Wikepedia, a more curated i.e. deletionist version would certainly be very useful for offline usage and quite a few other purposes.
- exDM69 6y ago
  > I for one would really like a say 3 GiB version of English Wikipedia without Pokemon and Porn, or a 33GiB version with useful images. There are several offline snapshots of different sizes of Wikipedia that do exactly this. Some of them are more thoroughly curated, others are a snapshot of the most popular articles, etc. What I could not find easily was a full English Wikipedia with images and all available in an easily accessible format (like the Kiwix snapshots). I'd put a whole hard disk for this purpose, because the size is in the gigabyte-terabyte range.
  - asah 6y ago
    Some relevant links: 100,000 curated pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Level/5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Level... In terms of space, the text is over 1000x smaller than the multimedia: ~20GB (uncompressed) for the text vs ~45TB (compressed) for multimedia (est accounting for growth vs 23TB@2014). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
  - monort 6y ago
    What's wrong with kiwix snapshot of English wikipedia? It's only 93GB. http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2020-09.zim http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_all_max...
    - patrec 6y ago
      Well, I was hoping for less than 93GiB compressed, given that this exceeds the storage capacity of several devices I'd like to use it on and I'd estimate the total amount of info I care about to be far smaller than that. And small is beautiful: if everything fits into ram, you can do various interesting data munging tasks on the data (which is after all not uninteresting) very quickly.
  - patrec 6y ago
    I am aware that there are various offline wikipedia compilations and I am grateful they exist and to the people who work on them, but last I looked using them looked like a bit of pain, and on checking again that still appears to be the case. I get the impression that if I want to have something of decent quality that fits into the 10s of GiB range I'd consider reasonable¹, I'd have to manually munge together several non-Pokemon topics I consider important plus one of the text only dumps. This would be more palatable if I had a strong impression that once I hit upon a working process I could rinse-and-repeat on a yearly basis. Do you have any experience with this? ¹E.g. the 100k top article page linked by sibling does not look super promising, ~700 math articles vs ~10k fluff (sports, entertainment etc.).
    - exDM69 6y ago
      I have the ~80GB "full english" snapshot I grabbed some time ago and use with Kiwix. It's not quite "full", it doesn't have quite all images and video, etc. But the size is still reasonable for a desktop/laptop PC. I also have a 10GB snapshot on my phone, but it's a bit lacking. I don't have enough storage on my phone to fit the bigger one. But a battery powered offline Wikipedia is high on my list of necessary things in case things go south. I haven't found a great way to keep these synced up, glad to hear if someone has a good solution for up-to-date offline wikipedia.
- swiley 6y ago
  Meh. Even my phone can store the entire text of English Wikipedia and still have half the storage left over for sloppy OS and App code.
quietbritishjim 6y ago
I think the point was that if you are looking at a subject where the relative importance is less obvious than Pokemon vs Nigerian politics then you could gauge importance implicitly from the existence of the article in a curated encyclopedia - not that contributers should be forced to spend more time on more important topics.
mekkkkkk 6y ago
If they were employed to do so, they would. A curated encyclopedia with paid researchers would not be bound by the whims of weebs.

29athrowaway 6y ago

Some people call this phenomenon "wikigroaning": "the art of highlighting Wikipedia's bias toward things that don't matter". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikigroaning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikigroaning https://www.somethingawful.com/news/wikigroaning/ https://www.somethingawful.com/news/wikigroaning/

wishysgb 6y ago
I just don't get why doesn't it matter . for what it is Pokemon is a game and in some ways a form of art, and since many humans are interested in it deeply that means that it is important to them. I think it is important human knowledge, there is no need to be elitest about it.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  Some pokemons are inspired in real world animals. Many people know the pokemon and not the animal. They know about drowzee but not about the tapir.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

And yet there's a ton of information that is rejected from Wikipedia itself, which found a place on e.g. Wikia and a few other sites like that - mainly about gaming, but also about subjects like D&D, etc.

musicale 6y ago
If Bulbasaur is on Wikipedia, then Owlbear should be also. ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owlbear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owlbear

ben_w 6y ago

I remember a similar comparison with Tony Blair back when he was the Prime Minister of the UK; the response was that while Wikipedia did indeed say more about Pikachu than Blair, Wikipedia also said more about Blair than did whichever “proper” encyclopaedia Wikipedia was being compared with at the time.

musicale 6y ago
Well, Pikachu has been a highly influential Pokémon for nearly 30 years.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

I recall reading that there was a time the Wikipedia article on the lightsaber was longer than the article on the printing press. No longer the case, thankfully.