Well not quite but close. I’m holding a hard disk that has ALL of Wikipedia’s text in 10 different languages.

Yes you can download all of Wikipedia and yes it can easily fit in a hard drive. Isn’t that amazing? Text is incredibly dense compared to images and video. Around 22 GiB for English Wikipedia alone and 56 GiB for the 10 languages I downloaded.

I also have all of Wiktionary in the same hard drive. It’s around 16.4 GiB.

  • @[email protected]
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    2710 months ago

    It also connects you to a huge swath of humanity and the editors that brought that content to you.

    • @droning_in_my_earsOP
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      1910 months ago

      Yeah it’s pretty incredible. Wikimedia is the kind of project that almost feels like a small glimpse into a better world. What the internet could have been. It’s got some problems of course but it’s still a huge success.

      • @[email protected]
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        18 months ago

        Uh, wikipedia is what the internet is.

        Wikipedia’s not a glimpse of a better world, it’s a glimpse of our current, existing world. Because wikipedia exists.

        It’s not like that hard drive came through a portal from another universe.

  • @trolololol
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    1010 months ago

    Not the sum. The summary.

  • Masterblaster
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    710 months ago

    there’s still so much valuable academic information that never sees the light of day, or gets erased as the internet serpent eats its own tail.

  • @[email protected]
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    610 months ago

    Last time I looked into downloading Wikipedia it said it was 50gb for English text and 100 with images. How’d you get it for half the space?

    • @droning_in_my_earsOP
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      910 months ago

      It’s only the raw text in json line files. No media and no markup. I think I downloaded a compressed dump then used wikiextractor to extract the text.

      • @AbouBenAdhem
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        210 months ago

        Does it include each article’s edit history, talk page, etc?

        • @ace_garp
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          310 months ago

          OK yes, some supporting info is: Aard2 is an offline wikipedia app, that uses small compressed data files in .slob format.

        • @[email protected]
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          18 months ago

          Slob compression is best visualized as putting a sleeping bag into a stuff sack, except it’s all your possessions and you’re stuffing them into an old Chevy Metro