User:PeaceSeekers/The big of (Malay) Wikipedia, and my pipe dreams

Hai there, Peace here. This is my writing on how the Malay Wikipedia has developed so far, especially since I've become an admin there from 2022, and when I started being active in Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia (WCUGM), and my (insane) dreams for Malay Wikipedia .... and Wikipedia in general. You can apply this to any Wikipedia conjured in your head.

Note that this is more of a random "brain outlet" writing rather than a formal research, so buckle up your seatbelts. Oh yeah, I also write this in anticipation of Wikimania 2023 at the flip-side of the causeway; if you're here from my cards, welcome!

How big is Malay Wikipedia now?

As of time of writing, we have around 366 thousand articles, spanning over 69 (bruh) million words. If we gather all those words in the Wiki like what Tompw did for the English version, it's currently ~~181 volumes, just shy of filling the rack (with only the last rack remaining to be filled)~~ CORRECTION: I've done my calculations, and it's only 70 volumes ... not a lot, but still praisable; I did this myself and you can check it in my Malay user page. As a comparision, the Indonesian Wiki has around almost ~~double~~ triple of that: over 190 volumes.

In terms of pixels, per Wikiscan, we currently have 2.6 GB of data for all pages (including categories, templates and such), with 40 GB if all history revisions are included. 2.6 GB is around a size of a middle-tier size PC video game (which makes me a bit unsatisfied; typical AAA games usually have tens of GBs, some in the hundreds).

As far as development goes, it seems that we're "on track". Viewership's at an all time high; over 40 million views in July 2023, the second-highest we've ever seen, just after November 2022 due to the election season. The number of editors is also in a high in Malay Wikipedia's history, as WCUGM brings forward more new editors.

So, in short, we're in a good position now, huh. But still, there's still a lot to cover.

Thinking (too) big

"Every byte is delicious ... except if it's vandalism or a bad edit, then it becomes a poison."

Level A: Indonesian Wiki

We start off simple ... reaching the level of Indonesian Wiki. Currently, ID Wiki has 7.5 GB of data. It is doable, and there's a good chance that if we rope a couple hundred editors, we can probably go close to that of ID. And after that, we can easily go to 10 GB. Having an online encyclopedia that large sounds like a decent success for me.

Level E: A million!

A million articles! Yeah, simple as that ... and no, we're not gonna bot our way up there, that's cheating.

Level O: English Wiki

As we gain more and more and more editors, we could probably reach English Wiki's size, currently 144 GB. To avoid time-pass redundancy, we put the target as 150 GB. Well, I can just do a mass translation effort, but then, the sense of originality in Malay Wikipedia will degrade; everyone will only think it as EN Wiki 2.0.

Level X: Project Apollo

In that hit game Horizon Zero Dawn (which by time of writing, I still haven't play its sequel yet ... maybe after Wikimania), there's this cool thing called Project Apollo, which was supposed to be a collective of human knowledge for later use ... basically, Wikipedia in steroids ... sort of. It's said to have around 180 million entries, but only in a few languages. And to be fair, it's a quite a bold of a number; Emijrp counted that by right, a "perfect" Wikipedia should have around 120 million articles.

Assuming one article contains ideally, 75 thousand bytes; that means my hypothetical Level X wiki has 13.5 TB of data. Far bigger than the the aforementioned 144 GB, but only about half the size of the English Wiki if all revisions are included: which is about 23 TB; makes sense, as counting page histories, we'll looking at over a billion entries.

Level Z: Going further

Now that we've reached terabyte size, how about we go further? Going up the ranks of the byte prefix, we have some serious stuff over here. Now, we imagine the average article size is around 100 thousand bytes; as such, the Level X wiki should have 12 TB.

After terabytes, we got a petabyte, exabyte and zettabyte ... now, we should probably think what stuff we should cover as we pass Emijrp's threshold, and what topics we should expand on. Maybe:

An elaborate explanation of all stars, and all space objects?
- And then, derived some more articles like "geography of X"; perhaps their landmasses and rivers (regardless of type of liquid, and if they have one)
A wall-to-wall biography of all musicians and all of their (notable?) singles and albums?
Every notable book in existence, regardless of language?
Idk ... maybe your cat(s)/dog(s)/other animals in your disposal?

Take attention to the question mark on "notable"; there's no way we can reach such bytes unless we decrease our notability threshold, unless in the moderate/far future, we have reach a Type 2 civilization and we have so much humans, political entities, technologies and events happening for Wiki to cover.

Level Omega: Yottabyte

This is basically an ode to my favorite artist, Martijn; he has a song of the same name, and this is how I got the idea of this. How much is a yottabyte?

Too big ... likely that the current size of the entire internet still haven't surprassed this; the global traffic data is currently on the zetabyttes (an order of magnitude lower than a yottabyte) since 2016. Oh yeah, and if we "translate" this into number of articles, that means we have should have 10²⁵ articles. Perhaps, we should have articles about individual buildings now?

And crazy enough, the SI decided to add even more higher-degree prefixes in 2022. I guess I can dream a bit bigger (and Martijn just found himself a new song title).

Level ???

Let's think large numbers, and I mean big. Maybe decillion articles? Vigintillion?

How about a googol bytes? Welp ... too bad, the estimated amount of particles in the universe doesn't reach that amount (around 10⁸⁰, or 1 with 80 zeroes behind) ... which means that if even we build a storage using individual particles as bytes, it's practically impossible to reach that amount (unless we found dark matter and harness that as our computer storage).

And, oh well, what we gonna cover or write to reach that amount? How much people we gonna recruit to go to that size?

So, what now?

So ... what's the point of all of these? Reaching even Level X seems crazy enough, let alone after that. What's the point of dreaming of an impossible-size Wiki? What's the point of ... dreaming the impossible?

Well, for me, imagining too big stuffs brings me an aim for too big stuffs, and putting that as my destination shapes how my travel I'll be. "Aim for the stars; even if you don't reach the stars, you'll probably end up in the moon." This is my primary objective of this essay: to think big goals for the Wiki, and motivate myself to create pathways for the Wiki's sustainability and growth. Here's how that should work:

More editors – Continue organizing edit-a-thons, editing fests and alike. Promote Wikipedia as a viable hobby.
Make the editors stay – Communication and community building, especially through social medias and servers.
- Making learning easier – Ease the learning curve and make Wikipedia editing learning less daunting.
- Better and clearer guidelines – Make guidelines clearer and thorough so the editors are less confused and not give up.
Efficiency and productivity – Making editing processes easier so they can edit and contribute more in a time frame.
Community – Build a knit community as so they aren't feeling alone and add some fun to the Wikipedia journey. Make it a viable, thriving community.

So yeah ... thanks for attending my brain outlet, and I hope Malay Wikipedia continues to grow to become a great website, for me, our Wiki community, and the Malay-sphere as a whole.

And in extension, all versions of Wikipedia, big or small, that exists now or later on (especially the Malaysian indigenous languages Wikis we've tried building for so long), human or botted, and in the height of its glory or still struggling in a pool of issues. Hope one day, we can see the online megalith called Wikipedia, becomes the true shining light upon the knowledge of man, where people come together to celebrate knowledge in ones and zeroes, all around the world.

Glory to Mankind.