4 ms·

I'm with you on links being distracting, but it seems you... nuked them entirely, which maybe goes too far haha? I guess you can always go back to source if you

I'm with you on links being distracting, but it seems you... nuked them entirely, which maybe goes too far haha? I guess you can always go back to source if you want that.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
I just moved them to the bottom of the article. In part this is because I feel inline links on wikipedia often lets you overestimate how well you comprehend a subject. It's as though the fact that there is a link over a word makes you think you could go check what that is, and therefore that you probably understand the word. Actually looking up some term mid sentence is also probably not particularly helpful for understanding the text either. I concede that this is a somewhat unusual decision, but I designed the pages for the singular purpose of reading and comprehending the article. Everything else is secondary. It's a bit of a design experiment, but I think it's worked out pretty well. I don't fall into skim-reading these articles like I must admit I often do with regular Wikipedia articles.
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  I love what you've done with the links, and will use this, I think. Thank you for your excellent work!
- dsizzle 5y ago
  Oh, ha, I didn't even notice that. Ok, I like that! I was actually looking at the footnote links, and those do indeed seem to be missing entirely -- as well as the whole references section. Arguably that's more important than links to "definition" wiki pages, so it forms the basis for the knowledge (vs mostly just definitions).
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Yeah, I removed those entirely, as I very rarely use those. More often than not the links are pay walled and the references are books that may or may not even be in print. Maybe it's useful if you have a university library at hand but I don't so I simply live with the fact that some of the things I've read may be wrong. If you want to look up sources it's better to use the live wikipedia at any rate, since it will be more up to date than this snapshot.
    - dsizzle 5y ago
      Ehh, I would say it's useful to see the reference even if you don't follow the link, but I'm sure it also depends on the nature of the topic. Seems easy to just preserve that section, but, hey, it's your site. Maybe there's a cost aspect you're considering? On that note, I'm curious how much it costs to basically mirror all of Wikipedia, if you wouldn't mind sharing?
      - marginalia_nu 5y ago
        I do a lot of these design experiments. I have an idea such as "what if wikipedia was designed only with reading comprehension in mind" and then I see what taking it to the most ridiculous extreme does. Sometimes it pans out, like I'm fairly happy with this wikipedia mirror, sometimes it doesn't--like I have no logos or branding anywhere on my sites, that turned out to be a bit confusing. My mirror clocks in at 21 Gb. I'm self hosting so there's no real money cost besides the one-time investment in hardware. A really chap person could probably host this off a raspberry pi attached to something like a Corsair Voyager and serve multiple requests per second. There's some technical trickiness in actually storing the files in a file system, since most filesystems don't deal well with having millions of files in the same folder. So I've had to build a four-tier directory structure based on the hash of the file name to be able to store the files. They're stored in a structure like 31/444/781/225/foobar.gz. I did some experiments storing them as BLOBs in a database, but I couldn't get it to work.
        dsizzle 5y ago
        Interesting. What are the bandwidth considerations for this? I had the impression that many ISPs make self-hosting impractical on normal household plans, but then I've never looked into it seriously.
        marginalia_nu 5y ago
        Dunno, I have unlimited uploads and downloads @ 100 mbit, and I host both this Wikipedia mirror as well as a search engine and some other stuff. The bandwidth usage is pretty inconsequential since most of my pages clock in at just a few kilobytes.

I'm with you on links being distracting, but it seems you... nuked them entirely, which maybe goes too far haha? I guess you can always go back to source if you want that.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

I just moved them to the bottom of the article. In part this is because I feel inline links on wikipedia often lets you overestimate how well you comprehend a subject. It's as though the fact that there is a link over a word makes you think you could go check what that is, and therefore that you probably understand the word. Actually looking up some term mid sentence is also probably not particularly helpful for understanding the text either. I concede that this is a somewhat unusual decision, but I designed the pages for the singular purpose of reading and comprehending the article. Everything else is secondary. It's a bit of a design experiment, but I think it's worked out pretty well. I don't fall into skim-reading these articles like I must admit I often do with regular Wikipedia articles.

JasonFruit 5y ago
I love what you've done with the links, and will use this, I think. Thank you for your excellent work!
dsizzle 5y ago
Oh, ha, I didn't even notice that. Ok, I like that! I was actually looking at the footnote links, and those do indeed seem to be missing entirely -- as well as the whole references section. Arguably that's more important than links to "definition" wiki pages, so it forms the basis for the knowledge (vs mostly just definitions).
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Yeah, I removed those entirely, as I very rarely use those. More often than not the links are pay walled and the references are books that may or may not even be in print. Maybe it's useful if you have a university library at hand but I don't so I simply live with the fact that some of the things I've read may be wrong. If you want to look up sources it's better to use the live wikipedia at any rate, since it will be more up to date than this snapshot.
  - dsizzle 5y ago
    Ehh, I would say it's useful to see the reference even if you don't follow the link, but I'm sure it also depends on the nature of the topic. Seems easy to just preserve that section, but, hey, it's your site. Maybe there's a cost aspect you're considering? On that note, I'm curious how much it costs to basically mirror all of Wikipedia, if you wouldn't mind sharing?
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      I do a lot of these design experiments. I have an idea such as "what if wikipedia was designed only with reading comprehension in mind" and then I see what taking it to the most ridiculous extreme does. Sometimes it pans out, like I'm fairly happy with this wikipedia mirror, sometimes it doesn't--like I have no logos or branding anywhere on my sites, that turned out to be a bit confusing. My mirror clocks in at 21 Gb. I'm self hosting so there's no real money cost besides the one-time investment in hardware. A really chap person could probably host this off a raspberry pi attached to something like a Corsair Voyager and serve multiple requests per second. There's some technical trickiness in actually storing the files in a file system, since most filesystems don't deal well with having millions of files in the same folder. So I've had to build a four-tier directory structure based on the hash of the file name to be able to store the files. They're stored in a structure like 31/444/781/225/foobar.gz. I did some experiments storing them as BLOBs in a database, but I couldn't get it to work.
      - dsizzle 5y ago
        Interesting. What are the bandwidth considerations for this? I had the impression that many ISPs make self-hosting impractical on normal household plans, but then I've never looked into it seriously.
        marginalia_nu 5y ago
        Dunno, I have unlimited uploads and downloads @ 100 mbit, and I host both this Wikipedia mirror as well as a search engine and some other stuff. The bandwidth usage is pretty inconsequential since most of my pages clock in at just a few kilobytes.