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.

  • kali_fornication@lemmy.world
    8·
    6 months ago

    I have all of wikipedia in a single 156 GB text file. in my .zshrc i have fastWikiLookup() { cat ~/wikipedia.txt | grep "$@" }

    • Badabinski@kbin.earth
      9·
      6 months ago

      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.

        • kautau@lemmy.world
          2·
          6 months ago

          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

  • malean@lemmy.world
    5·
    6 months ago

    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.

  • kingofthezyx@lemmy.zip
    4·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • BigDiction@lemmy.world
      5·
      6 months ago

      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.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      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

      • arrow74@lemmy.zip
        2·
        6 months ago

        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

    • NateNate60@lemmy.world
      2·
      6 months ago

      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.

  • titanicx@lemmy.zip
    1·
    6 months ago

    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.