wikipedia on S Anand

Wikipidia Citation Impact

Thu, 28 May 2026 10:00:58 +0800

Imagine you’re an information anarchist. You undermine Wikipedia pages by nuking references.

A genie has granted you a wish: you can nuke one entire domain. Just one.

As a data-driven decision maker (who is also an information anarchist 🤷), which would you pick?

A common choice is The Internet Archive. 2.9 million Wikipedia pages reference it.

But, you’re sneakier than that. A page isn’t undermined just because some references are gone. It’s undermined when all the references are gone.

In that case, the most devastating domain to nuke is Statistics Poland. Over 45,000 Wikipedia pages cite only Statistics Poland as their reference.

Or, if you’re particularly fond of the Polish, destroy sports-reference.com. Over 37,000 pages cite it as their only reference.

If you prefer hurting scientists, go for biolib.cz - an online encyclopedia of plants, animals, and very importantly, fungi. (But then, you don’t need to nuke it - the “server is experiencing high traffic” quite often.) In any case, this is where you’ll find most satisfaction, as more sites depend solely on biodiversity and natural history archives like marinespecies.org (WoRMS), Natural History Museum, IUCN Redlist than any other category.

For detailed research on which site you’d like to nuke, see What If a Website Just Died?

Longest repeated paragraph on Wikipedia

Tue, 26 May 2026 22:20:17 +0800

What is the most frequently occurring sentence in Wikipedia? ANS: A 213-word paragraph about how minor planets are named, which appears in 418 Wikipedia articles, word-for-word!

There are ~380,000 asteroids. Wikipedia has 418 pages for these - including one for each thousand-range of asteroids.

Every single one of these pages includes the phrase:

As minor planet discoveries are confirmed, they are given a permanent number by the IAU’s Minor Planet Center (MPC), and the discoverers can then submit names for them, following the IAU’s naming conventions. The list below concerns those minor planets in the specified number-range that have received names, and explains the meanings of those names.

Official naming citations of newly named small Solar System bodies are approved and published in a bulletin by IAU’s Working Group for Small Bodies Nomenclature (WGSBN).[1] Before May 2021, citations were published in MPC’s Minor Planet Circulars for many decades.[2] Recent citations can also be found on the JPL Small-Body Database (SBDB).[3] Until his death in 2016, German astronomer Lutz D. Schmadel compiled these citations into the Dictionary of Minor Planet Names (DMP) and regularly updated the collection.[4][5]

Based on Paul Herget’s The Names of the Minor Planets,[6] Schmadel also researched the unclear origin of numerous asteroids, most of which had been named prior to World War II.

Check out these pages | 85001-86000 | 213001-214000 | 269001-270000 | 380001-381000

This is not the only such common sentence. There are several more.

Here’s the Slovakia census note: 81 words that appear across 2,920 Wikipedia pages, like Sabinov District, Smolenice, Ilija, Slovakia, Baloň, … and thousands more!

Note on population: The difference between the population numbers above and in the census (here and below) is that the population numbers above are mostly made up of permanent residents, etc.; and the census should indicate the place where people actually mainly live. For example, a student is a citizen of a village because they have permanent residence there (they lived there as a child and has parents), but most of the time he studies at a university in the city

Note: As of 26 May 2026, this has been shortened to:

Note on population: The difference values of population numbers in the table “Population statistic” and in the sections “Ethnicity” & “Religion” is caused by the use of various statistical methods.

There are several more such that you can read about in The Paragraph That Appears 418 Times.

That also includes how Codex analyzed the Wikipedia structured dataset on Hugging Face and what else you can do with the data.

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When I realized Aishwarya Rai begins and ends with AI, I had to find out if there were more like her.

It took a coding agent (Claude Code in this case) 10 minutes to find the 10 celebrities who share that distinction, at least across the 24,086 names on Wikipedia:

Ai Nagai - Japanese playwright
Aiguo Dai - Chinese-American atmospheric scientist
Ai (poet) - American poet
Aisea Nawai - Fijian rugby player
Ai (singer) - Japanese-American singer
Aisha Chughtai - Pakistani actress
Aiyappan Pillai - Indian social reformer
Aizawa Seishisai - Japanese Confucian scholar
Ainmuire mac Sétnai - Irish high king
Aisha Yousef al-Mannai - Qatari artist

Glory be to these AI bookends!

PS: It’s pretty cool that two celebrities are known just as “Ai”!

The Long Tail of information sharing

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 12:00:00 +0000

The Long Tail of information sharing. Even on Wikipedia, fewer than 2% have contributed over 100 articles. Over 85% have contributed fewer than 5 articles. A Wiki inside an organisation is unlikely to reach critical mass, left to itself.

Comments

Arun 28 Apr 2006 6:10 am: But I imagine, many in the 85% probably contributed stuff that the prolific guys never thought of. For instance, I know one guy who put up something on Ananth Pai (Tinkle, Amar Chitra Katha), and i doubt he probably ever added anything else. But you are right about wiki in an organization. Do you know an organization where a wiki has been used effectively?
S Anand 28 Apr 2006 10:22 pm: No, not offhand. We were planning to recommend it at one of our clients’, but I’m not going to do that any more.
sathish 30 Apr 2006 2:39 am: if the organization strength is large - runs into many thousands or lakhs - I think the required critical mass might be acheived.. for smaller companies and small teams too, it might make sense - since, every one is liable to participate - especially product documentation - it would be easier make/correct and change.
Arun 30 Apr 2006 6:02 am: Ah, ok.
S Anand 30 Apr 2006 8:45 am: A colleague just reported that his current client is successfully using a Wiki. So may it’s not impossible after all…
Madhu 2 May 2006 12:24 pm: wiki is all about scale i think. The sergery brin special lecture at UCB is a case in point. You can access this at google videos

Uncyclopedia

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Uncyclopedia. As Arnab points out, this is much tougher than Wikipedia.

Comments

Jetru 30 Mar 2005 6:38 am: what the heck is this? TOUGHER???!
S Anand 30 Mar 2005 6:41 am: Yeah. The lies have to be consistent with all previous lies.
Jetru 30 Mar 2005 1:21 pm: oh.lol

Google and Wikipedia

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Google donates infrastructure to Wikipedia. Possible benefits to Google?

Test another end use for the famed Google OS
Get an “authoritative” knowledge base to provide search results on
Position against Microsoft Encarta as an encyclopaedia

OpenCola

Thu, 31 Jan 2002 12:00:00 +0000

OpenCola has an open source cola recipe. You also have OpenLaw and Wikipedia.