Comment on Will you be willing to pay for using Twitter?

• rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  • The entirety of the English Wikipedia can be stored in a single commodity hard disk. The entire database (with revisions and all) is less than 1TB. All other wikipedias combined amount to something similar. This is probably less data than what Reddit ingests every day.

  • Less than 0.05% of the Wikipedia users have done any type of contribution to the content. The absolute majority is just visiting to read it.

  • The content of an encyclopedia changes way less often than any social network. Any page written can be a resource used for any high-school student doing research for an assignment. How many people bother to revisit week-old memes on Reddit or imgur, let alone something written decades ago? Yet, both Reddit and Wikipedia need to store all their content forever.

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  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    • most data on WMF servers is media files, most of them photos; Wikimedia Commons has at this point nearly 100 million of those; probably still less than many social media sites, though
    • this is true, but many people on social media are also only lurkers
    • the WMF projects get lots of changes every minute, just look at the recent changes page

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    • rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The “rule” of social media is that users split 1%/9%/90% on creators (prolific posters), participants (comments and reshares content that might be interesting to them) and lurkers (don’t necessarily signup and only visit to read). That means that we have 200 times more “active” (0.05% vs 10%) users on social media relative to wikipedia. The operational costs and the staff required to moderate these sites should follow this proportion as well.

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