Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Wikipedia going down like that makes me sad, especially since due to ai crawlers, their traffic costs went up significantly.
Why would anyone crawl Wikipedia when you can freely download the complete databases in one go, likely served on a CDN...
But sure, crawlers, go ahead and spend a week doing the same thing in a much more expensive, disruptive and error-prone way...
There are valid reasons for not wanting the whole database e.g. storage constraints, compatibility with ETL pipelines, and incorporating article updates.
What bothers me is that they -- apparently -- crawl instead of just... using the API, like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&format=json&page=Lemmy_%28social_network%29&formatversion=2
I'm guessing they just crawl the whole web and don't bother to add a special case to turn Wikipedia URLs into their API versions.
If you're training AI models, surely you have a couple TB to spare. It's not like Wikipedia takes up petabytes or anything.