The Wikipedians Who Make it Happen

Phoe6 writes "Many of us might have wondered who these crazy people are, spending lot of time at wikipedia and presenting us with such an invaluable information. Wired has decided to give some credits to the most active wikipedians, in their article titled Wiki becomes a way of life"

Link to the first page...

[Stradenko]

page 1 [wired.com] of the article.

The link in the post goes to page two for me ... not very nice.

Some interview! -- Wired needs to be a wiki

[Anonymous Coward]

"Stacey Greenstein" is a man! How the heck do you do an interview then manage to go to press with the wrong pronouns in places? Too bad wired isn't a wiki.

Hey wired, good job on your homework!

Re:Wiki

[dkf]

That sometimes happens (e.g. the page on Dubya at the time of the last US election). When it does, the page gets locked for a while so people can cool off and focus instead on conveying facts and balanced opinions.

Re:I love the wikipedia,

[Jon Chatow]

Bandwidth isn't the problem (or the cost, really), but the servers. We spend $4k-ish a month on bandwidth (off the top of my head; ICBW), but we spent about $65k in just the last 6 months on servers (see the server list [wikimedia.org]).

BTW, we prefer that people just call it "Wikipedia", without a definite article.

Re:but..

[vossman77]

From here [wikipedia.org]

How big is the database?

About 170GB on 9 October 2004, excluding images and multimedia.

About 57GB on 11 April 2004 and growing at between 1 and 1.4 GB per week. This includes all languages and support tables but not images and multimedia. You can download compressed database dumps at http://download.wikipedia.org/.

It's released under the GPL, so anyone caan bring back the free content for free.

Re:Wikipedia is too biased to be useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comment is utter bullshit, as anybody can verify by looking at the actual page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Eagle_Scouts [wikipedia.org]

Also, there is no "they".

Re:Wikipedia is too biased to be useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this comment being moderated up? A quick glance at the article's history shows that "Charles Manson" has never been added except for today, and has never been removed.

Re:Still wondering who these crazy people are

[Johnboi Waltune]

Click on the first link to see the list of contributors, then click on a username to see that person's profile. Most of them write something biographical there, and some have a picture.

Re:WTF? Why would you /. Wikipedia?

[Anonymous Coward]

talk of /.ing wikipedia kinda makes me laugh

maybe it has happened in the past but wikipedia hardly notices /. now

its a noticeable but small blip in the squids traffic to the squids and pretty much nothing at all beyond that

there are two types of slashdotting:
1: bandwidth slashdotting: wikipedia has a gigabit link that is not exactly heavilly utilised so this just isn't going to happen.

2: server load slashdotting: (that is where a badly designed dynamic site can't keep up) squid pretty much takes care of making sure this doesn't happen (/.ers are very much a flash crowd they come they mostly view the same pages and then they go again if your site does seperate dynamic rendering for every pageview with no caching you are in trouble)

the main reason the /. effect is so infamous is because of the types of sites /. targets wikipedia long ago passed the point where /. looks big

http://www.alexa.com/site/site_stats/signup?site _u rl=wikipedia.org+slashdot.org&range=1y&widget=g&st yle=c&submitted=true&mode=graph&range=3m&amzn_id=

wikipedia has had problems (power currupts power failure currupts absoloutely) and more recently some problems related to the software keeping transactions open too long whilst purging the squids and to a lesser extent hardware shortages. HOWEVER bandwidth and /. are NOT problems currently.

Re:but..

[Meostro]

This [wikimedia.org] has the whole database (in bz2 format) at 538MB for current [wikimedia.org] and 27GB for old [wikimedia.org]. You can get the old in 1.9GB p [wikimedia.org] i [wikimedia.org] e [wikimedia.org] c [wikimedia.org] e [wikimedia.org] s [wikimedia.org] if you like, too, but 6 * 1.9 != 27, so something must be missing.

Anyone have a torrent of these?

Re:Wikipedia is too biased to be useful

[Bronzefinger]

It looks like the article [wikipedia.org] was edited by a pesistant vandal, (Sistertina), from a brief look at the edit history [wikipedia.org]. These edits were also reverted (restored to the original version), fairly quickly, as they removed everyone from the list. If there are other edits removing Charles Manson, that don't seem to be by the same person, please post links to the edit history. If not, this looks to be more a case of one isolated idiot, rather than sytematic bias.

In any case, Charles Manson is on the list now. I also notice no comment about keeping the list " nice for the kids" on the discussion page [wikipedia.org], was this in e-mail?

Re:I'd be happy if....

[Denyer]

using wikipedia as "source" is like saying something is true because your brother-in-law says it is (and he's a dr/atty/chemist/nobel laureate/cereal box prize winner/etc....). Not credible.

So, about equal to many history and politics textbooks.

Wikipedia is a useful first source of information. Research for any project should include a wide variety and decent number of sources. Published encyclopedias are often riddled with errors and out-of-date information.

Re:Still wondering who these crazy people are

[Raul654]

Easy way to tell - take a look at the pictures I took at some past [wikipedia.org] Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] meetups [wikipedia.org] (although there's a distinct bias in favor of old people who can find transportation). To get a more accurate breakdown by age, see Wikimedians by age [wikimedia.org] (a page which, for the record, I started).

Re:Why I don't like Wikipedia

[Taxman415a]

I would like it if you would point out the technical article you edited and the changes were reverted. While your version of the events is possible, and probably does happen rarely, it is unlikely. If you are correct, I will personally look to make sure the correct information and reference are in the article.

1) It would work for a while, but eventually the incorrect facts and bias they add will be rooted out. A proper research and verification process would ensure this.

2) A libre, open, gift-culture-based process for creating a public good that is currently growing at an astounding rate is not "breaking with the established dogma/doctrine/explanandum of the era"?

3)Given enough time and edits, Wikipedia articles can cite every fact to those same peer reviewed papers and collate all important human knowledge. Those biases can be discussed and accounted for.

4)When the above is done, Wikipedia will be reliable. Until then it is not. But if you trust any other one single source now to be 100% correct you are naive. So why is Wikipedia different? Of course it contains errors, but the process is that they are rooted out *relatively* quickly.

So you've basically joined the countless others that want to sit on the sidelines and point out the problems instead of contributing. It is much more difficult to build something remarkable than it is to be a critic.

Re:All Male?

[dysprosia]

Let's use the link Raul gave above as a reference, ie. a list of women on Wikipedia [wikimedia.org] (there are however others who have not listed themselves there), and the list of Wikipedians by number of edits [wikipedia.org], noting the Wired article uses the main namespace as an index, we have:

Angela: No. 31. in the main namespace; No. 10. in all namespaces.

Morwen: No. 18. in the main namespace; No. 25. in all namespaces.

Jengod: No. 21. in the main namespace; No. 27 in all namespaces

Dysprosia: No. 24 in the main namespace; No. 32. in all namespaces
There are just four of the "top authors" ( 32 in the main namespace, UtherSRG's "ranking").

So, not all of the top authors are male.

Well, we do get spikes, they just don't hurt

[Jamesday]

Really obvious spikes are caused by Yahoo Japan. Extremely fast onset, 300-500 hits per second in less than a minute, then fast decay time over a few hours. One page so the Squids do an excellent job of caching it. The apache web servers/page builders don't normally show a spike at all from that. Slashdot has obviously slower onset, though it's still quite fast. TV also seems to cause fast spikes but we havne't seen enough while we've been able to chart it - previously had the caps set too low for a good measure. Newspapers are far more gentle in their load properties. The Tsunami coverage caused a general rise throughout the day for several weeks.

On the Slashdot/RSS thing, RSS is getting quite a reputaton for really unpleasant surge loads. Something we're factoring in to anything we doing relation to RSS, designing for caching. Not really a surprise if Slashdot has had to do some tweaking.

We were suffering a bit today from the combination of Slashdot, Wired News (Wikipedia Becomes a Way of Life [wired.com]) and Spiegel Online with an overloaded image server. Image server was bouncing around 100% utilization, kept some pages in the queue too long and that hurt overall apache capacity. We've seen far worse and we're getting rid of that bottleneck. As a temporary measure we've asked people to remove some pretty but not content images from a few places. Won't last long, though.

On the fund-raising side, the drive ended early after exceeding its $75,000 target. It's currently at around $95,000 probably with some data still to arrive, close to reaching $100,000, my initial thought of a target. Really good news for those of us doing the capacity and reliability work but it'll take a few months for it to be visible. Thanks to everyone here who helped!

Anyone who wants to spend a bit of money on another useful project might consider sending a bit to Freenode.net [freenode.net], the IRC host. Among other things they host our channels, including our offsite 24/7 IRC NOC and a superb MySQL channel, regularly inhabited by MySQL employees. Providing good service to lots of other open source projects.