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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!"
One would think that educational institutions would snatch something like this up in a heartbeat (same goes for the GPL version of education documents and reference material). Or is it that the maturity of the project isnt near what standard university requirements yet is the hold up?
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
Is the quality as high as when they started? I went there when they were first mentioned on slashdot. The quality control process they described was very impressive but also daunting for anyone wanting to contribute. If they've reached the 100k article threshold with the same quality control it is world-class resource.
Jason
ProfQuotes
But the sheer simplicity of this solution, especially if you are starting from available documentation, should, as I have long advocated, make it useful for a lot more than a GPL Encyclopedia.
Espen
I got my set of Britannicas for fourty cents per volume at a thrift store.
People are throwing out their classic paper encyclopedias.
And lets face it: for many topics, i.e. mathematics, history, etc. an old edition of Britannica is damned fine.
People go out and buy a CDROM version of Britannica and say 'why do we need these books.'
Ten years from now I will still have my Britannica set. Their CD-ROM won't access in whatever is the latest-greatest-shiney OS.
Sorry for being a curmudgeon, but it's things like traditional books in traditional libraries that are the basis of our cuture, that got us to the Moon.
Ok, compare them now
Encarta:. aspx?refid=761570898
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/RefArticle
Wikipedia:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman
I incorporated much of the biographical details from the Encarta article into Wikipedia, rewriting the information, of course. Notice also that the Wikipedia article has more cross-references. That being said, the article still needs work, and I would still give Encarta the edge on this topic. However, perhaps a Whitman fan or two will notice the page on Recent Changes and work on it. Maybe in a few days, Wikipedia's will be better.
Hmmm. I spent quite a few years working on Encarta.
The key words in this sentence are "quite a few years". Encarta has been around since 1993 and has the professional muscle that comes with being a Microsoft project. Also, MS bought the rights to the text of Funk and Wagnall's encyclopedia to start them off.
Wikipedia, on the other hand, is two years old (just a toddler!), is staffed by volunteers, and has only parts of public domain reference works (1923 and earlier, along with US government publications) to draw on (and they're often not much help). You would think that our Walt Whitman page would say "5r|ptK1ddi3 0wns j00!", but it doesn't. Wikipedia is quite amazing, and the quality is only improving.
Help us! When you compare a Wikipedia article to one from Encarta and find Wikipedia's lacking, do something about it! Pull the information from the Encarta article (and rewrite it!) and help build the world's largest copyleft encyclopedia.
Stephen Gilbert (who has lost his Slashdot password)