Today I Learned

17430 readers

1 users here now

What did you learn today? Share it with us!

We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)

Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.

** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**

Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.

Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.

Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.

Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.

Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.

Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.

Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.

Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.

Partnered Communities

You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.

Community Moderation

For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

522

TIL That the entirety of Wikipedia is only ~100Gb and you can download it for offline use (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

67 comments fedilink hide all child comments

In light of the recent Crowdstrike crash revealing how weak points in IT infrastructure can have wide ranging effects, I figured this might be an interesting one.

The entirety of wikipedia is periodically uploaded here, along with many other useful wikis and How To websites (ex. iFixit tutorials and WikiHow): https://download.kiwix.org/zim

You select the archive you want, then the language and archive version (for example, you can get an archive with no pictures, to save on space). For the totality of the english wikipedia you'd select the "wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2024-01.zim"

The archives are packed as .zim files, which can be read with the Kiwix app completely offline.

I have several USBs I keep that have some of these archives along with the app installer. In the event of some major catastrophe I'd at least be able to access some potentially useful information. I have no stake in Kiwix, and don't know if there are other alternative apps and schemes, just thought it was neat.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 36 points 4 months ago (1 children)

DYK that Kiwix was actually created by Wikipedia? Back in the late 2000s there was this gigantic effort to select and improve a ton of articles to make an offline "Wikipedia 1.0" release. The only remains of that effort are Kiwix, periodic backups, and an incredibly useful article-rating system.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Can you write more about the rating system you mentioned?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

There is a set of criteria to rate an article B, C, Start or Stub. These are called classes. Similarly, articles can be rated to be of 1 of 4 importance values to a particular WikiProject.
There’s a banner on every article’s talk page. Any editor can change an article’s rating between one of the above classes boldly; if a revert happens, they discuss it according to the criteria.
Some WikiProjects have their own criteria for rating articles. Some of them even have process to make an article A-class.
Before this system, Wikipedia already had processes to make an article a Good Article or Featured article.

With GAs, a nominator should put a candidate onto backlog. Later, a reviewer will scrutinize the article according to criteria. Often, the reviewer asks the nominator to fix quite a bit of issues. If these issues are fixed promptly, or the reviewer thinks that there are only nitpicks, the article passes. If they aren’t fixed in a week or the reviewer thinks that there are major problems, the article fails.
- As with other processes, the nominator and reviewer can be anyone, though reviewers are usually experienced.
With FAs, a nominator brings the candidate to a noticeaboard. Editors there then come to a consensus about whether the article should pass.
Both processes display a badge directly on passed articles.
Both processes have an associated re-review process where editors come to a consensus whether the article should fail if it were nominated today
There’s also an informal process called “peer review”, where someone just puts an article at a noticeable and anyone can comment about its quality.

Articles are automatically sorted into categories by their rating and importance. Editors usually look at these to decide which articles to focus on nowadays.