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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!"

4 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Am I the only one who is just hearing about this? by saitoh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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..."
  2. Quality? by Jason1729 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  3. Wiki for documentation by DrEspenA · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I recently did some consulting for a large, public organization, and suggested they do their in-house documentation Wiki style. This organization has a huge body of mostly textual documentation for technical equipment - and letting everybody update it seemed to me to be a great idea. You need a couple of organizational safeguards, of course, such as version tracking and rewards for people who do a lot of editing and write well. And you definitely need to assign some people of moderator quality to hammer out a culture of neutral point of view, attention to detail and frequent cross-checking of each others material.

    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
  4. Re:Free is good by SN74S181 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.