I know a lot of Dopers question the veracity and grammar of the articles themselves, but I’m talking about the search engine and the discussion boards, two topics discussed much there in the past from what I understand?
The Search engine at Wikipedia is a joke- a fucking joke. Do any of you know if they have any plans to change to a google-type engine at any point? How can such an incredible site not have a functioning search engine?
And their message boards are of course clunky, crappy, and archaic, so many people have asked for a vB over the years from what I hear; but I know those cost money to create and run and all. Still though, it would be great- the current messaging system is a joke.
A great place like Wikipedia deserves a good search engine and a vB so we can we talk non-stop about articles and actually search for them, too. :rolleyes:
Before the anti-Wikipedia zealots come in and trash this thread, Google does a bang-up job of indexing Wikipeida and I think most people just use ‘site:en.wikipedia.org term’ in a Google search box. This isn’t an excuse, but it is much better than dealing with crappy technology.
As for the message boards, I’ve never seen them and I can’t offer any helpful advice.
Note the absolutely, monumentally, overridingly great thing about Wikipedia: it’s free. Given this fact, then I think one has to accept that the infrastructure behind it is only going to be largely the best one can get for free, too.
As for the articles, they are generally fine in most areas, but if any fact is crucial to one’s work, then what appears on the wikiarticle should be corroborated with at least one more other source.
Like the Encyclopaedia Britannica guy said, Wikipedia is like a public toilet - you’re never sure who used it last.
Yes, the search engine sucks. We know this. Feel free to write a new one.
Licensing Google’s search technology would be great. It would also likely cost more than our annual budget. Maybe you can talk Google into giving it to us for free? Please note that (unlike SOME places) Wikipedia does not have advertising to pay for it – although we did compute that the 6,000 page requests per second that Wikipedia peaked at earlier this week could generate up to $60 million a year in advertising revenue if we were so inclined. We make do on grants and donations with an annual budget of around $1 million, most of which goes to buy hardware and pay colocation costs.
Google does index Wikipedia preferentially (they really like us; as Jimbo recently said on CSPAN, “we help make the Internet not suck”), so the search trick Derleth mentions does work rather well. During periods of high load, when the search server (yes, we have a separate server for doing searches: Wikipedia currently requires about 110 servers to keep it running) is overloaded the search engine fails out to a page that just offers a Google site search.
Now, as to our “message boards”: Wikipedia does not have “message boards”. Wikipedia is a project to write an encyclopedia. It has discussion pages and user talk pages as an aid for developing the encyclopedia. While Wikipedia does have a community (as an Arbitrator, I am keenly aware of this), we don’t need a vBulletin to supplement or replace talk pages; they work quite well for our purposes, thank you. Quite simply replacing talk pages with vBulletin would be a disaster of monumental proportion. That said, I have yet to hear anybody request replacing talk pages with vBulletin (that is, until your post). If your main purpose in participating in Wikipedia is to post on talk pages, perhaps you need to find a different hobby.
Ah ha! someone from wikipedia is here! I have a question for you.
When the zombies attack, I figure we probably have maybe 3 or 4 days before the internet starts to crumble, and all human knowledge become unavailable. Is there a way to download the wikipedia knowledgebase so that once the hoards of undead have finally been dispatched, our straggling band of survivors can rebuild civilization in wikipedia’s image?
Our crazed development staff puts periodic dumps of the various Wikipedia databases (there are LOTS of them) at http://download.wikimedia.org. (I wish vB accepted MediaWiki markup…) The enwiki dump is quite large: 5.8G for the most recent (and that’s compressed and without images).
That is incredible. I might do my bit for humanity by simply downloading it onto a secondhand drive (printing out the encoding protocol onto some long lived substrate), sealing it in a tough, evacuated container and burying it in my garden.
I wish to really stress the following.
Do not search in wikipedia unless you already know the article is there.
It is quicker to type in Google as an example try:
Search Engines Wiki
It even retrieves quicker because the front page of Wiki is a slow loader and google is a fast loader.
Yes I know it was already said, but it bears stressing. Wiki is a great fee tool. Google makes it more usable.
KellyM, I just want to say thanks for the undertaking. Wikipedia at the very least is a wonderful idea and effort, and considering the number of subject specific wikis springing up on the net, is on it’s way too becoming an ubiquitous and essential tool for information. Again, kudos.
What percentage of the articles are accurate? My son relies on Wikipedia for research for school, and although I know it’s liable to editing by kooks and trolls, I haven’t seen any blatant errors or misinformation. Granted, I haven’t read all the articles, but the few I’ve read seem well-thought out and put together.
Ah, the bitch-and-moan-about-something-that-is-free type. I have pitted them more than once because I receive similar attacks about my site. Meh!
So KellyM, you guys are doing a great job. Thanks a lot, Wiki is one of the very few sites I’ve felt compelled to make a donation to. It wasn’t so much a donation as a “this is a fucking cheap fee”.
If you think the resulting tree of knowledge is going to be impressive, think again. Trees of knowledge are better described as crappy little bushes with lots of thorns. The fruit is a little funky too. I developed a taste for it but most people refuse to eat it at all.
Wikipedia is a useful tool for getting general information. I’d never rely on information from Wikipedia as much as I would from something like EB, though.
I think wiki is the second best thing on the net. (Porn, of course, is the first.)
There are a few simple rules to follow to weed out the bad stuff:
If the article is poorly written, then there’s a good chance some mistakes have crept in.
look at the links at the bottom and make sure there are some independent sources.
look at the “history” tab for a given article and see how much it has been edited. There’s also a discussion tab to see if anyone has taken issue with the content.
Otherwise, I find it to be a gem. I’m constatinly amazed at the both the depth and the breadth of subject matter. Great job!!
