Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Wikipedia Reaches 100,000th Article

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the cdrom-size-archives-would-be-nice dept.

An anonymous reader writes "'Wikipedia, a community-built multilingual encyclopedia, is announcing that the English edition of the project has reached a milestone of 100,000 articles in development. In addition, the project itself has celebrated its two-year anniversary on January 15. But not just the English version has grown impressively: More than 37,000 articles are now being worked on in the non-English editions of Wikipedia.' Read the press release for more information or visit the website to enlighten yourself! It's great to see that this interactive project works; at least I don't have to boot into Windows to use Encarta anymore!"

18 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. A Great Collaborative Success Story by philovivero · · Score: 4, Informative
    For any doubters you know that say collaboration can't generate something awesome, Wikipedia is a gigantic, glowing, neon proof that it can, indeed.

    I've spent hours browsing topics on that site, and remain constantly amazed at the depth and breadth of knowledge on it.

    For amusement, look up "slashdot" on it. You will find more history and amusement than you remembered ever living through yourself.

    It even covers the troll era, with entries on Natalie Portman, grits, whatnot (I dare not type too many examples lest I be lameness filtered).

    --
    fifth sigma, inc.
    1. Re:A Great Collaborative Success Story by philovivero · · Score: 4, Informative

      Sorry for a second post, but another awesome wiki with a more technical bent is at c2 dot com (I linked you to starting points). Another place where I've spent hours and hours and... aaah. Collaboration rocks.

      --
      fifth sigma, inc.
    2. Re:A Great Collaborative Success Story by obsidianpreacher · · Score: 3, Informative
      For any doubters you know that say collaboration can't generate something awesome, Wikipedia is a gigantic, glowing, neon proof that it can, indeed
      For another great success story, but one that does not (IMHO, YMMV) seem to have the depth of knowledge that Wikipedia.org has is Everything2.

      While I'm not sure if either of these would qualify under an "open source movement," they seem to uphold many of those ideals (both are made by countless numbers of people, both revolve around things that cover broad topic material, both are freely editable and upgradable by anyone/everyone, both are free (as in beer)). Perhaps people can start to see just how powerful an Open Source movement can be, and begin to use other great tools developed by like-minded people (GPG, *nix, just to name a few!), if they're introduced to wonderful success stories like these.

      Spread the word about great sites and projects like this to your non-Open-Source-knowledgable people. Explain to them in plain terms that they can understand ("it's an online encyclopedia, like WorldBook or Encarta, but it's free"), and we can really see this movement take flight.
      --
      topreacher@signature.slashdot.org 1% rm -rf sig
    3. Re:A Great Collaborative Success Story by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      And an even greater success story - so much so that it was listed in the Sunday Times' Top 50 Websites of 2002 - is h2g2, the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, as inspired by Douglas Adams' series of the same name.

      It has a nice collection of entries and the community feeling there is wonderful. You should check it out!

  2. Everything2 by mr100percent · · Score: 3, Informative
    I'm a bigger fan of Everything2.com. Currently at 479,928 writeups.

    1. Re:Everything2 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

      I only go there for the personal anecdotes and humourous stories. Actually getting dry, useful information out of it very difficult, but it's softlink system is lovely for just browsing around reading cool stuff.

      It's like a super duper version of Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button!

    2. Re:Everything2 by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Informative

      I just wrote a comment on How and Why E2 works. You would do well to read it, because your objections to the fact that users actually own their own content (which is good for the site, and good for the users) are unfounded.

      There's no useful criteria for what is acceptable content and what is not.

      The reason E2 has a graded level system which takes more effort to progress as you go on is that you can learn from higher-level users, and as you gain an understanding of what is and is not popular, your progress is displayed so others can learn from you. In that sense it is MORE collaborative than Wiki.

      The number of votes for an article is often completely irrelevant for whether it is deleted or not -- I've had write-ups with over 25 votes deleted because another write-up in the same node was considered spam. Uh, yeah.

      This does happen. Editors have the final say. It's unfortunate that your WU was blown away but it probably was insufficient to the task of adequately explaining the title of the node. I've had nodes deleted which were factual but an editor found offensive. That's unfortunate, but them's the breaks. I *am* really annoyed that a comment is not required when a node is deleted, but anonymous is okay; we don't need pogroms against editors on E2.

      Discussions are basically impossible because write-ups are supposed to stand on their own.

      You don't want a discussion in a node which should stand on its own. If you have a brilliant discussion with someone on a topic, node the discussion separately and quit whining.

      The fact that WUs should stand on their own is also the reason for no web links. If you have to link to a website to explain something, you haven't explained it. I do list the URLs of my references (when they are websites, as they usually are) so that people can find them for more information. This is the way it is done in professional literature; This is the way it was meant to be done on E2. This is why the bibliography was invented.

      And then the links. On E2, you are almost required to link every third word in an article -- it's about "everything", after all. But there's no distinction made between pages that exist and those that do not. On Wikipedia, links to non-existent pages are red, normal links are blue. On E2, all you can do is guess.

      The lack of a different link color for those links which go somewhere annoys the piss out of me but it's also a blessing. I have been known to click on a link, get frustrated that it doesn't go anywhere, and construct a writeup so that it does.

      E2 is interesting because of its experience system which makes it somewhat addictive. But that very same system rewards quantity, not quality. Gaining experience points is trivial, but to advance to the next level (yes, they actually use RPG-like levels) you have to create lots and lots of write-ups. So many people do, and the result is crap, crap, crap. There may be brilliant prose on Everything2, but it's hard to find. Much of it is like Slashdot at 0/1. Other annoyances: no images, web-links largely prohibited.

      On the other hand, if your writeups are too crappy, then they get nuked, and/or you lose experience due to downvoting. While it IS trivial to gain experience, writing COMPLETE crap will cause you to lose it. Writing crappy writeups and setting them hidden will cause them to get nuked later, with the corresponding drop in level since you need so many WUs and so much XP to stay there. I've lost a level before, though I did get it back five minutes later.

      The experience system does two really major things; it prevents new users from voting, and prevents relatively new users from doing much damage by voting. It DOES also make it addictive (though my interest has somewhat tapered off, and I only need like 20 more WUs to hit level 5, I do a node every two weeks or so lately) which can help produce more content.

      Even a mediocre writeup which provides some content is useful. As per the comment I link above, when it has been superseded, it can be deleted. I have personally superseded a fair number of writeups which were more than a couple paragraphs.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  3. answer to my own question... by Ack_OZ · · Score: 5, Informative

    Does anyone know how they make sure all the submissions are accurate?

    from their FAQs ...

    Since anyone can edit any page, why would I give any credence to anything I read here?

    We operate on the idea that many eyeballs make all errors shallow. Wikipedia is, self-consciously, an experiment in public collaboration quite unlike any print or online encyclopedia, and therefore it will be difficult to project the results, in terms of their credibility, until the project is farther along. But even then, you'll have to judge the results based on the articles themselves, rather than the credentials of their writers (which is itself often an unreliable way to determine credibility).

    Some people think Wikipedia will give Britannica a run for its money. m:Making fun of Britannica.

    Some people have plans for peer review or article certification systems to work on top of Wikipedia. We'll be sure to point them out if and when any get up and running.

  4. Re:Am I the only one who is just hearing about thi by scrote-ma-hote · · Score: 4, Informative
    The big problem with this is it's best feature. Accuarcy. I was just browsing the site for something that I know in a reasoable amount of depth, and came across the entry for heart attack .

    It states things like "Infarct refers to the artery being plugged or clogged up", where it actually is the death of tissue cause by a lack of oxygen. Things like that restrict it's use severly. I think I'll stick with peer reviewed articles for the moment. Universities tend to have libraries full of them.

  5. Re:Am I the only one who is just hearing about thi by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Try The 'Earth Edition' of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, it has a vast array of well-written articles.

    The approach they take regarding peer review is interesting. There are two types of guide entry - edited and unedited. The edited guide is a collection of peer reviewed and edited articles, and likely to be more accurate and readable. The unedited guide entries are just anything, really. Could be total nonsense.

    Anyway you should check it out, it is a good site and has a much better community aspect than Wikipedia or Everything2. In a sense it is more like Fark or Slashdot, only more friendly.

  6. Re:comparison by brion · · Score: 4, Informative
    You'll find some vague comparisons to paper encyclopedias at Wikipedia:Size comparisons. It's hard to compare directly, though; Wikipedia tends to divide up large subjects into a number of separate entries, and includes quite a few entries on subjects that aren't likely to be in traditional encyclopedias (imported US Census data on 30,000 communities, including one-horse towns in the midwest somewhere of little historical importance; culturally significant films, games, internet culture phenomena, yadda yadda).

    If you're interested in publishing a dead-tree edition, we'd love to hear from you. ;)

    --

    Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?

  7. Re:How do you check how many writeups there are by mr100percent · · Score: 2, Informative

    Everything Statistics

  8. Re:Duplication of effort by brion · · Score: 5, Informative
    H2G2 and everything2 are copyright-encumbered, making it impossible to create derivative works (ie, republishing a culled 'good parts' version, hardcover or CD-ROM editions, or continuing the whole project if the current sponsor drops it) without explicitly licensing content from the BBC or the individual authors.

    Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License, making it proof against the current network provider going out of business or losing interest, and opening its content up to reuse and repurposing. This in itself is, I think, worthwhile; what GNU and Linux provide to the world of operating systems, Wikipedia hopes to provide for the encyclopedia: something that's good enough and not subject to draconian use prevention.

    Wikipedia is also a multilingual project, with another 37,000 or so entries in the younger sister projects. I believe this is fairly unique among the field of competitors.

    (If you want to talk about duplication of effort, though, see the Enciclopedia Libre, a fork of the Spanish section of Wikipedia which split last year in protest over a since-repudiated proposal to include optional banner ads on the English section of Wikipedia to help offset the costs of operation.)

    --

    Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?

  9. Re:Encarta... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Master of the Anchor tag says:

    http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/RefArticle. aspx?refid=761570898
    vs.
    http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitman%2C_Walt

  10. Just compare to Nupedia by vrt3 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Nupedia is also o free collaborative encyclopedia, but uses rigourous peer review. Comparing Wikipedia and Nupedia, one can see that Wikipedia has articles on much more topics, while the quality is certainly comparable.

    --
    This sig under construction. Please check back later.
  11. Re:making money with it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    You can do that right now. Here is the link to download the aricle database.

    http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database _d ownload

    --mav

  12. Everything 2 by AlgebraicSpore · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yeah but do they have anything on Everything 2?

  13. Re:Am I the only one who is just hearing about thi by JoeBuck · · Score: 2, Informative

    I just checked, and the error has already been corrected.