Help Me Kick Jimbo Wales Out of My Life.

July 25, 2006 11:06 AM

Where can one find a comprehensive list of all sites that mirror (and I do mean mirror as in full mirror, not mirror as in quote from) Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, and other such content? I'm in a Wikipedia-expunging mood and wish to program the CustomizeGoogle Firefox extension to ignore the Wikipedia/Wikiquote/Wikibooks/Wikiwhatever/Wikikitchensink Wikisexguide monolith. (Let's not make this thread into an inquiry as to why I'm doing this. I'm just realizing that doing this piecemeal as they come up could take me forever.)
posted by WCityMike to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Response by poster: Actually, I've just found Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks. The list is friggin' huge — and I'm really not sure I want to spend the time to change that list (in a rather complex table format) into a list of URLs. Anyone else know of an easier way to filter out Wikipedia? And how'd you do it?
posted by WCityMike at 11:13 AM on July 25, 2006

This is a great idea. This Wikipedia article points here.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 11:14 AM on July 25, 2006

Advanced Google searches permit you to include deny terms, so that you can say "Don't show me any page which includes the string "Wikipedia".
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:16 AM on July 25, 2006

If your ISP is using Akamai caching (most do), your quest may be further significantly complicated. Dynamic caches can grab a Wikipedia page, and seamlessly redirect that content to your browser, without hitting Wikipedia or mirrors. That's kind of the whole point of an Akamai style cache. So, unless you're going to examine every hyperlink you ever intend to click, for ISP level redirection first, you may be an unwitting, unwilling client of Mr. Wales' enterprises indefinitely.
posted by paulsc at 11:22 AM on July 25, 2006

Best answer: This huge list prepared for CustomizeGoogle was helpful to me (from a previous Askme).
posted by gubo at 11:23 AM on July 25, 2006

Response by poster: Gubo — BEAUTIFUL, those two links were so very much what I'm looking for. That combined with another posting I've put together (someone transcluded all the stuff onto one page, and from there it was just a matter of pulling out everything prefixed with "URL") should do it. Once I put the two together, I'll put something on my blog and post a link to the thread. Meantime, if anyone
posted by WCityMike at 11:26 AM on July 25, 2006

Response by poster: To start off, FYI, here's what you'd exclude for the wikiprojects proper:

http://*.wikipedia.org/*
http://*.wiktionary.org/*
http://*.wikibooks.org/*
http://*.wikisource.org/*
http://meta.wikimedia.org/*
http://species.wikimedia.org/*
http://*.wikinews.org/*
http://www.mediawiki.org/*

I think, combining the two, I've got a finalized list of the mirrors as they stand. (Collateral damage possible, but I'm not too concerned.)
posted by WCityMike at 11:46 AM on July 25, 2006

Response by poster: And these too, two:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/*
http://*.wikimediafoundation.org/*

Now. Anyone know how to make CustomizeGoogle not display filtered sites at *all*, as opposed to just showing them grayed-out?
posted by WCityMike at 11:59 AM on July 25, 2006

Somebody ought to make a simple Google search front-end using their API that does this automatically. Then it would be possible to use from any browser without any extensions. The API key is free for a certain limited number of queries per day.
posted by Rhomboid at 1:02 PM on July 25, 2006

Strange -- recently all my Internet reading has Wikipedia and almost nothing else.

There ought to be a feature in CustomizeGoogle to invisibly append -whatever (eg. -wikipedia, -blog, etc.) to each search. It'd be neat.
posted by reklaw at 3:02 PM on July 25, 2006

reklaw, it's possible (and easy) to customize your Google search bar in Firefox to do that. (Bookmarks/Quick Searches).

It should be theoretically simple to write a Greasemonkey script that would turn any Wikipedia URL whatever warning color you preferred. It might annoy you to run it everywhere, though.

Ironically, expunging Wikipedia from your search results is also useful for ... editing Wikipedia. Nowadays its PageRank is so high that the article you're working on (and its mirrors) often outranks other sources.
posted by dhartung at 1:14 AM on August 2, 2006