About the only time I find myself using regular Wikipedia these days is if I need to know if someone died since August 2025 when this ZIM dump was created.
friendly reminder to seed wikipedia :)
how to seed wiki? Like on a torrent?
Seeious question - since Wikipedia doesn’t serve ads, wouldn’t a drop in direct traffic be a good thing for them? It would reduce their server costs and presumably the people who truly value Wikipedia (contributors and donors) would still use it for its intended purpose.
Ignoring the population as a whole getting dumber, which seems to be a side effect of everything these days.
My concern would be losing market share to other sources resulting in Wikipedia slowly being forgotten by future generations. Then the downstream of effects of fewer new contributions, and increasingly consolidated moderators.
Then not being at the forefront of the Internet hurts prestige that reduces donations. I agree with your point on ad revenue vs server costs, but I imagine a 20% reduction in traffic hurts their long strategy more than a 20% reduction on hosting costs.
People are doing less reading
I don’t think that is a net positive
Technically, yeah. But with less people going to Wikipedia directly there would probably stand to be less chance of getting any new contributors. I’m not sure how the foundation gets all its money, but the more traffic they serve the more they can prove their relevance which might matter for funding
Maybe I’m cynical but the type to use just the AI overview and the type donating to Wikipedia probably doesn’t have that much overlap
A man of good taste, i see
Your comment answered my question. Which was how often hasn’t been updated. August 2025 was fairly recent but I’m betting a number of articles are out of date at this point in time. For general reference an offline copy is good and it helps to keep an archive. But I wouldn’t use it on the regular for standard references.
When I have to poop, I scroll through the Wikipedia app, I’m done scrolling reels/short. The front page is well curated and entertaing and at least I don’t have to deal with sloppy and fake content.
WikiTok Swipe through random articles.
There’s a wiki app?!
Fun fact, if you search for a term but start with !w you will get the wiki page.
I’m about to go find that as well
How did I not know this 😅
Idk I just learned about it like a week ago and I am from pre internet
I have all of wikipedia in a single 156 GB text file. in my
.zshrci havefastWikiLookup() { cat ~/wikipedia.txt | grep "$@" }If you want a free and massive performance optimization, remove the
cat:fastWikiLookup() { grep "$@" ~/wikipedia.txt }Reading and piping 156 GB of data to another process every time you want to look something up is a somewhat nontrivial action. Grep can directly read the file, which should result in a pretty damn good speed up.
i thought it was obvious i was joking but yeah, that would be faster
It was obvious and I was being a bit of a dummy this morning. Mea culpa.
Considering the community, I think catting 156 GB to grep and calling it
fastWikiLookupis a subtle joke about how absurd this is.Yeah, I was being pretty thick earlier today. Oopsie!
rip Greg would shine here
Poor Greg. 😔🪦
You know what? I’m leaving it.
RIP ripgrep Long live rip Greg
How fast is it, really? How do you differentiate between topics?
That’s the neat part …
the topic differentiation technology doesn’t exist yet, so i just hit ctrl+c about a second after i hit enter
lol database engineers who’ve built very complex systems and ingest and query mechanisms across the world all the sudden got very mad at your comment and they’re not sure why
what the hell I want that
How large is the dump and does it have images in it?
47 GB for text only, 111 GB with images (both only English articles)
Hm. I could self-host that.
Lol, “PatrickGPT” would be the easiest novelty chatbot to write, too.
10 INPUT "ASK ME ANYTHING>" 20 PRINT "[THINKING...]" 30 SLEEP 3 40 PRINT "THAT'S A STUPID QUESTION" 50 GOTO 10quick and dirty:
https://patrickgpt.negativenull.net/Fantastic! 😆
Patrick, can you stop that?
I’m on Linux because I hate Windows and Microslop, not because I love Linux.
While I’m guilty of sometimes stopping at the Google summary, which I see in Startpage searches, I usually do click through because the summary often doesn’t show what I want to know. Usually what I want to know isn’t the primary information, but something more obscure, or some possible connection.
