Hint: :q!
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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.
I have all of wikipedia in a single 156 GB text file. in my .zshrc i have
fastWikiLookup() { 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 fastWikiLookup is a subtle joke about how absurd this is.
Yeah, I was being pretty thick earlier today. Oopsie!
rip Greg would shine here
Poor Greg. ππͺ¦
You know what? Iβm 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 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
what the hell I want that
Holy...
my shit is optimized AF
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.
First article it gave me was for "Human extinction" lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
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.
I'm about to go find that as well
How did I not know this π
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
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
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.
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 10
Patrick, can you stop that?
friendly reminder to seed wikipedia :)
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?
47 GB for text only, 111 GB with images (both only English articles)
Hm. I could self-host that.
So, outdated Wikipedia?
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