Talk:Wikipedia to the Moon/Voting

Sigh

My thought had been to get a disk that would hold everything. The leading vote is to send glossy product brochures about every piece of software Square Enix ever made to the Moon.

Haha, yeah, the Square Enix work group did create some great articles. Don't underestimate Wikipedia's list of featured articles, though. For example, all major bodies in the solar system have reached featured status. This very month, articles like Marilyn Monroe, Omaha Beach, the red rail, and Paul McCartney got featured on the main page. Variation! ~Mable (chat) 13:50, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, it's beyond me how we can send a rover to the moon but we can't fit an encyclopedia on a disk. I'm also disturbed to note the shockingly low vote turnout. Wtf? WikiEditorial101 (talk) 08:00, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

The winning scenario

The number of FAs per wikipedia seem to be .1% of the wikipedia, which means the disc just has ~39,600 articles. The average size is ~50 KB, meaning only ~10% of the space has been taken up. The rest? The moon scenario still is only 200 articles, so what past that? JerrySa1 (talk) 20:30, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

We could possibly add all good articles and vital articles. Vital 1 and 2 in all languages, Vital 3 in the top 100 languages, Vital 4 in English, (if those articles are good enough to send) and the rest with?....JerrySa1 (talk) 20:49, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

It's ridiculous. I was pretty busy the last weeks so I forgot to add my proposal and apparently nobody thought about getting all of it up there even though the disc space (20GB) allows for it? Come on! Maybe we can fill the remaining space with rick-roll videos....or send all of the FAs and all of the other articles. --Fixuture (talk) 21:53, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

We only have space for 400,000 articles by my calculations. JerrySa1 (talk) 18:53, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Oh, we only have space to rick roll them 35 times if we go with the current plan, 4 with my suggestion.

@JerrySa1: According to this: Wikipedia Statistics - Bytes per article the average article size of the English Wikipedia was 3655 Bytes in 2010. So if let's say it's 5kB right now: 5kB x 5.185.357 articles = 24,7GB. I previously underestimated the size as this full-text copy of 2012 was put at about 10GB: Wikimedia Blog - Download the text of the entire English Wikipedia. However it's still just a bit more than the 20GB offered for the project - hence the question should rather be about what to leave on Earth and not what to take up on the Moon (e.g. all stub articles). And actually it would make much more sense to simply use a storage device just large enough - after all the project says about 20GB and not exactly 20GB - 5GB of extra storage space aren't that much. The proximity of the size makes me think that the ones who proposed the project did that calculation themselves.

Alternatively one could of course use compression (but I don't think that would be a good idea because of the difficulties for potential future readers). I guess the text-only download-package that's 10GB is compressed which is why it's so small.

50kB may be the average size of featured articles but not of all articles. And not sure what your suggestion is?

Anyways I hope that the project fulfills its title and actually gets Wikipedia to the Moon and not just a tiny fraction of it.

--Fixuture (talk) 18:16, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

@Fixuture: The thing is though, Wikipedia, in English alone, and just text is 51GB. Guessing for all of wikipedias, probably 400GB.

Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia

My suggestion was to add the Vital articles (though List of articles every Wikipedia should have works as well or better in this case), and good articles in all languages to fill up that extra space. JerrySa1 (talk) 21:05, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

@JerrySa1: Oh; you're right. Didn't read that part. I removed my suggestion from the discussion again. I guess the Wikipedia Statistics must be wrong then or have I misread them?

Alright. The English vital articles and articles of the List of articles every Wikipedia should have are an absolute must.

Concerning good articles of every language I think it would be much more valuable to include more encyclopedic content (from English Wikipedia) instead of multiple languages for single articles. I think the content and the global consensus if you will is more interesting for future readers than the differences between language-versions or the information only to be found in other language Wikipedias (when contrasting said to the information missing when not including articles in any language). And I don't think that future readers who'll be able to get to the Moon won't also be able to translate articles into their language. (I'd support including every article in every language from the list of articles every Wikipedia should have though.)

--Fixuture (talk) 19:16, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

@Fixuture: Yeah, that's a good plan. JerrySa1 (talk) 00:49, 15 July 2016 (UTC)