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
    1·
    1 month 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
      1·
      1 month 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.

  • kingofthezyx@lemmy.zip
    0·
    1 month 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
      1·
      1 month 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.

  • malean@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 month 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.