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.
Yeah, I should probably donate again or something
9 months ago by Admiral Patrick to c/linuxmemes
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.
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.
Yeah, I was being pretty thick earlier today. Oopsie!
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 whoβve built very complex systems and ingest and query mechanisms across the world all the sudden got very mad at your comment and theyβre not sure why
my shit is optimized AF
WikiTok Swipe through random articles.
This was my favorite random pull
There's a wiki app?!
Fun fact, if you search for a term but start with !w you will get the wiki page.
Idk I just learned about it like a week ago and I am from pre internet
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
Wikipedia relies on people reading it and realising "Wait, that's wrong..." to fix inaccuracies.
Recently some PR company was caught taking money to whitewash the Wikipedia pages of their clients. The more people that are looking at the pages, the more likely it is that someone will realise they are being manipulated maliciously.
quick and dirty:
https://patrickgpt.negativenull.net/
how to seed wiki? Like on a torrent?
Well I edit Wikipedia so if anything I am making its traffic increase.
How large is the dump and does it have images in it?
Hm. I could self-host 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.
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.
A man of good taste, i see
@lemmy.world
Hint: :q!
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go to feed...
@lemmy.world
Hint: :q!
Community rules (click to expand)
sudo in Windows.We all have our opinions, and certain public figures can be divisive. Keep in mind that this is a community for memes and light-hearted fun, not for airing grievances or leveling accusations.
Β
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.
go to feed...
I have all of wikipedia in a single 156 GB text file. in my
.zshrci havefastWikiLookup() { cat ~/wikipedia.txt | grep "$@" }save