Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive
Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive
www.theverge.com
Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive
32 comments
-
-
Do theverge have this big font or is something broken on my end?
You can download the entirety of Wikipedia for offline usage, BTW. I do this with an application called Kiwix https://kiwix.org/en/ .
- Click "All Files" on the left menu of the program.
- In the bottom search bar (there is one top and one bottom bar) type "wikipedia" to show only those entries matching the search.
- Then click on the "Size" header to sort all entries by size. Usually the biggest one is the most complete.
- Now "Download" it (i already have it, so it says "Open" for me).
Note that the big one with 111 GB contains images and contains all English language Wikipedia articles. The one with 43 GB should be the same I think, but without images. There are many other variants too, varying in content and theme and even build date. In example the one with "1m Top" contains the top 1 million articles only.
-
The fact you can download the entirety of the site for 111gb sounds pretty damn impressive to me.
-
It doesn't actually include all the media, and -- I think -- edit history. It does give you a decent offline copy of the articles with at least the thumbnails of images though.
Edit: If you want all the media from Wikimedia Commons (which may also include files that are not in Wikipedia articles directly) the stats for that are:
Total file size for all 126,598,734 files: 745,450,666,761,889 bytes (677.98 TB).
according to their media statistics page.
-
Text is light. Images are a bit heavier, but there's not too too many.
-
-
The problem with this solution is that it leaves out the most important part of Wikipedia of all; the editors. Wikipedia is a living document, constantly being updated and improved. Sure, you can preserve a fossil version of it. But if the site itself goes down then that fossil will lose value rapidly, and it's not even going to be useful for creating a new live site because it doesn't include the full history of articles (legally required under Wikipedia's license) and won't be the latest database dump from the moment that Wikipedia shut down.
-
Some solution is better than no solution. I don't mind having a 'fossil' version for a pinch. We got along okay with hardcovered encyclopedias pre-internet and this is not that different except it still being reliant on electricity. (I have different, more valuable books on hand if we ever wind up THAT fucked.)
-
Wikipedia is not at risk of being shutdown, the danger is malevolent editors bringing the culture war inside of it and destroying "truth". While it would be great to keep wikipedia as it is, "they" are coming for it, wikipedia doesn't get to be excluded from the war. For now the best we can hope for is that it will survive but the best we can do is save local wikipedia copies in case the worse happens. Which isn't shutdown, but corruption.
-
-
Best thing is that it works flawlessly on the mobile apps as well, and Wikipedia also has a 1 million most relevant articles or so, which is just a few gigabytes.
-
Thanks for sharing this. Started hosting a local copy of several wiki sources last weekend once this news broke.
Another commenter said downloading is missing out on the best part of Wikipedia, the ongoing editing. Which, while true, is also going to be a weak point.
How many of those amazing editors are going to stick around when their full time job becomes combatting obvious right wing bullshit, when they have to submit gov ID to have an account on the site, and when common sense and fairness becomes a crime?
Wikipedia was a high point for humanity. Whatever comes next I'd like to preserve a little piece of it.
-
Honestly someone recently posted on the hisoricalness of jesus and the article seemed way different than a few years ago and I would say less accurate. Sorta wish I had downloaded it in like 2015.
-
-
Paywall; DR
-
You can read it if you add archive.ph/ in front of the link (replace the www with it). It really is a well written article. I also don't like paywalls, but I like good journalism and as they are still figuring out a way to earn money on the web I also understand their choice for these types of strategies.
-
32 comments
Wikipedia needs to leave the US at the least. Billionaires and AI pose a threat to all humans, and Wikipedia is no exception.
And the Internet Archive too
However I wonder how this would work. As far as I know Internet Archive have a "Library" status and rights in the US (and only in the US), which grants them rights to archive stuff and have it as download that would be otherwise not legal. That does not mean everything provided there is legal. So leaving the US could actually hurt Internet Archive or the users in the US maybe.
I would be glad if anyone with more insight into this topic could tell me one or two things about it.
Ang go where?