Wikipedia Reaches 100,000th Article

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!"

Comments

A Great Collaborative Success Story

[philovivero]

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).

Re:A Great Collaborative Success Story

[philovivero]

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.

Re:A Great Collaborative Success Story

[obsidianpreacher]

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.

Re:A Great Collaborative Success Story

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Everything2

[mr100percent]

I'm a bigger fan of Everything2.com. Currently at 479,928 writeups.

answer to my own question...

[Ack_OZ]

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.

Re:Am I the only one who is just hearing about thi

[scrote-ma-hote]

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.

Re:Am I the only one who is just hearing about thi

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:comparison

[brion]

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. ;)

Re:Duplication of effort

[brion]

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.)