Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive
www.theverge.com
The site’s volunteers face threats from Trump, billionaires, and AI.

The world’s largest encyclopedia became the factual foundation of the web, but now it’s under attack.

  • OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.mlEnglish
    30·
    1 day ago

    How do you download the entire Wikipedia? Someone said it was possible to host it and also resources for Anna’s archive and other archive sites.

    • nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      31·
      1 day ago

      downloading it is fine but i think the contents of wikipedia are so thoroughly archived that i doubt it is in danger of becoming “lost media”.

      my fear isn’t that the information would be destroyed, but that the ongoing project of keeping the knowledge up to date would stop, or be split across some underground efforts with varying quality standards.

      • oce 🐆@jlai.luEnglish
        11·
        1 day ago

        As of 7 September 2025, there are 7,052,247 articles in the English Wikipedia containing over 4.9 billion words (giving a mean of about 706 words per article). The total number of pages is 63,983,130. Articles make up 11.02 percent of all pages on Wikipedia. As of 16 October 2024, the size of the current version including all articles compressed is about 24.05 GB without media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

        The following graphic illustrates how large the English Wikipedia might be if the articles (without images and other multimedia content) were to be printed and bound in book form with a format similar to Encyclopædia Britannica. Each volume is assumed to be 25 cm (9.8 in) tall, 5 cm (2.0 in) thick, and containing 1,600,000 words or 8,000,000 characters. The size of this illustration is based upon the live article count manually adjusted by the average word count on an irregular basis on a user subpage of the graphic’s creator Tompw. The growth rate is approximately one full volume every three days if the increase in average article size isn’t accounted for over time. The print volumes as shown in the illustration would take up just over 9.34 m3 (330 cu ft) in total volume.