Daily Wikipedia Game
The Wikipedia mobile app has a new daily game where everyday it gives you five pairs of historic events from that day in history. Surprisingly difficult, I only got 2 of the 5 for today.
As far as I can tell it's only in the mobile app, there's no desktop implementation.
Here's an example from the 29th:
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Update on last night's 'Wikindle' code
Code ran without issue, though the formatting was slightly off.
This morning I hammered out the code to grab the top 100 most popular entries from yesterday and add them to the archive. I'm not sure how useful that will actually be, a lot of those entries are pop culture (am I really going to need an entry about the new Kraven Marvel series?) But we'll see. It isn't like this is a major space hog.
Last night snagged roughly 8,000 entries and it took up 250 megs. Plenty of space.
One thing which is lost in this process is any cross linking. I'd love to go through and add that back in, or even better figure out how to best avoid that bring stripped out from the start. We'll see. In any case, a fun diversion to distract me.
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Wikipedia on my Shelf Progress
At this moment my PC is downloading nearly 10,000 entries from Wikipedia as part of my idea of a locally hosted version of the encyclopedia. I'm making use of the Vital articles project, specifically level 4, which is roughly ten thousand entries on various topics.
I cobbled together a python script to pull from the API, parse the HTML to markdown, strip any lingering tags (such as spans, abbrs, etc.)
It isn't perfect, no images from the entries are brought over. I'll work on that further in a future iteration.
Not sure what to call this project. I called the folder "Wikindle" as a smerging of "wikipedia" and "kindle" but I don't love that name. I'll play around with it.
I also have an idea for this to be a "living" archive. Where perhaps it is a cron script which runs nightly for that day's top X entries, and snags them, accruing more and more notable content over time. Obviously quality will vary, but we'll see how it goes. Then, every few months, I update the Kindle.
Lastly, my observation as I work on code this evening. It remains comforting that ChatGPT struggles with some very basic coding concepts. I know lots of people worry LLMs will lead to the end of programmers but that simply isn't true as far as I can see. At least, not without more massive steps forward.
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Timeline of the far future
While surfing Wikipedia this evening, I came across this interesting article.
While the future cannot be predicted with certainty, present understanding in various scientific fields allows for the prediction of some far-future events, if only in the broadest outline. These fields include astrophysics, which studies how planets and stars form, interact, and die; particle physics, which has revealed how matter behaves at the smallest scales; evolutionary biology, which studies how life evolves over time; plate tectonics, which shows how continents shift over millennia; and sociology, which examines how human societies and cultures evolve.
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I wonder what we can see about AI's impact on Wikipedia already. Has there been an uptick in edits? What posts are getting the most attention? How are the bad actors cloaking themselves?
So far, I can't find anything useful in Google about it right now. The top responses are an article about internal division on how to handle AI on the site, which is important but not ultimately what I'm looking for. Then found a few older pieces which talk about AI in relation to the site, but usually either as part of their spam fighting efforts, or what people are doing with bots on the site.
I, like others, have concern about the AI impacts on content. I think of it as the rounding the corners and softening the content.
I recall coming across an article where someone talked about how they bought a physical copy of an Encyclopedia in response to their similar concerns regarding the post-truth era. Sadly I can't find it again.
I do kind of want to get an archive of Wikipedia for personal storage, though I've wanted this even before AI's surge. Mine is more of a sort of digital 'prepper' sort of motivation. That, and also I enjoy the idea of having a Kindle on my shelves which functions as an encyclopedia for us.
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She Spent a Decade Writing Fake Russian History. Wikipedia Just Noticed
Essentially the worst case scenario that makes Professors proclaim Wikipedia an unfit source for school.
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Wikipedia's Most Wanted
Came across this page, which collects a list of the articles that the site has found linked from multiple sources, but which the article does not exist. Interesting to peruse through.
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