11 ms·

Wikipedia: Size in volumes

112 points by dpcx 13y ago

tty 13y ago
Here's a comparison of all the versions of Wikipedia http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#All_Wikipedias_ordered_by_number_of_articles 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 13y 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 13y 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!
    - GFischer 13y ago
      I remember my high school teacher's first introduction to an online encyclopedia article - we were tasked with some writing, and one of my friends had this new "Encarta" software (that was 1994 or so). We made our homework in 15 minutes, proceeded to goof off all the afternoon, and blew away the teacher (we were intelligent enough to slightly modify it).
- ronaldx 13y 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.
  - tty 13y 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 http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitanti
    - ronaldx 13y ago
      Same type of data all over English wikipedia, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reeve,_Wisconsin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reeve,_Wisconsin The existence of those pages has no disadvantage and does not detract from the quality of the encyclopedia (if correct) - wikipedia itself points out that it is not a paper encyclopedia and there is no limit to the amount of content. I do not understand the disadvantage of listing Abitanti and providing its location within Slovenia.
      - simias 13y ago
        Maybe it's just not the kind of contents I expect to find in wikipedia, and as such is just click-bait since it's likely to be high in google search results? If I want to know the location of Abianti within Slovenia I'm more likely to turn towards some mapping website rather than wikipedia, where I'd expect a more detailed description of the city's history and other relevant information.
        duskwuff 13y ago
- simias 13y ago
  What's the incentive of artificially inflating the article count? Is it just a stupid race to be "on top"?
  - blowski 13y 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 13y 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%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D1%83%D1%87%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0:Zserghei/%D0%93%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0 http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B1%D1%81%D1%83%D0%B6%... (title -- "Race")
- Dosenpfand 13y 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=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fct%2Fartikel%2FWikipedia-Der-Kampf-um-die-Relevanz-846332.html http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=... http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fflaschenpost.piratenpartei.de%2F2011%2F12%2F11%2Fwikipedia-die-relevanzdebatte%2F http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=ht...
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- a3_nm 13y 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 13y 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 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 13y ago
That's actually.. smaller than I would have thought.
- gchokov 13y ago
  Me too..
- M2Ys4U 13y 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 13y ago
Ah, but that's answering quantitatively and most people would probably want any value question answered qualitatively.
ZeroMinx 13y ago
Latest what-if is relevant here; Updating a Printed Wikipedia - http://what-if.xkcd.com/59/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/59/
- dlhavema 13y ago
  dang someone already posted this.. I love that the main cost of printing/maintaining this would be the cost of the ink.
- agumonkey 13y 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 13y 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_greek.html http://demonocracy.info/infographics/eu/debt_greek/debt_gree...
- GotAnyMegadeth 13y ago
  Good link, thanks
- dlhavema 13y 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 13y 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 ?
- Dylan16807 13y 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 13y ago
    It would be more useful to compare the LoC with the combined text, graphics, and other applicable media of every Wikimedia site.
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      I feel like the text is the most important part for an encyclopedia. Some images are needed, but not a huge number.
Houshalter 13y 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 13y ago
  How big is it, in terms of file size?
  - harshreality 13y ago
    From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#English-language_Wikipedia 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.
    - Houshalter 13y ago
      There seems to be a few http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_App http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_App .
  - Houshalter 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.

112 points by dpcx 13y ago

tty 13y ago

Here's a comparison of all the versions of Wikipedia http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#All_Wikipedias_ordered_by_number_of_articles 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 13y 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 13y 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!
  - GFischer 13y ago
    I remember my high school teacher's first introduction to an online encyclopedia article - we were tasked with some writing, and one of my friends had this new "Encarta" software (that was 1994 or so). We made our homework in 15 minutes, proceeded to goof off all the afternoon, and blew away the teacher (we were intelligent enough to slightly modify it).
ronaldx 13y 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.
- tty 13y 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 http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitanti
  - ronaldx 13y ago
    Same type of data all over English wikipedia, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reeve,_Wisconsin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reeve,_Wisconsin The existence of those pages has no disadvantage and does not detract from the quality of the encyclopedia (if correct) - wikipedia itself points out that it is not a paper encyclopedia and there is no limit to the amount of content. I do not understand the disadvantage of listing Abitanti and providing its location within Slovenia.
    - simias 13y ago
      Maybe it's just not the kind of contents I expect to find in wikipedia, and as such is just click-bait since it's likely to be high in google search results? If I want to know the location of Abianti within Slovenia I'm more likely to turn towards some mapping website rather than wikipedia, where I'd expect a more detailed description of the city's history and other relevant information.
      - duskwuff 13y ago
simias 13y ago
What's the incentive of artificially inflating the article count? Is it just a stupid race to be "on top"?
- blowski 13y 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 13y 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%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D1%83%D1%87%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0:Zserghei/%D0%93%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0 http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B1%D1%81%D1%83%D0%B6%... (title -- "Race")
Dosenpfand 13y 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=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fct%2Fartikel%2FWikipedia-Der-Kampf-um-die-Relevanz-846332.html http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=... http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fflaschenpost.piratenpartei.de%2F2011%2F12%2F11%2Fwikipedia-die-relevanzdebatte%2F http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=ht...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
a3_nm 13y 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 13y 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 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 13y ago

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

gchokov 13y ago
Me too..
M2Ys4U 13y 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 13y ago

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

ZeroMinx 13y ago

Latest what-if is relevant here; Updating a Printed Wikipedia - http://what-if.xkcd.com/59/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/59/

dlhavema 13y ago
dang someone already posted this.. I love that the main cost of printing/maintaining this would be the cost of the ink.
agumonkey 13y 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 13y 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_greek.html http://demonocracy.info/infographics/eu/debt_greek/debt_gree...

GotAnyMegadeth 13y ago
Good link, thanks
dlhavema 13y 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 13y 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 ?

Dylan16807 13y 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 13y ago
  It would be more useful to compare the LoC with the combined text, graphics, and other applicable media of every Wikimedia site.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    I feel like the text is the most important part for an encyclopedia. Some images are needed, but not a huge number.

Houshalter 13y 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 13y ago
How big is it, in terms of file size?
- harshreality 13y ago
  From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#English-language_Wikipedia 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.
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    There seems to be a few http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_App http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_App .
- Houshalter 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.