Wikipedia Reaches 200,000 Articles

CanadaDave writes "The Wikipedia.org project to create a 'complete and accurate free content encyclopedia' has just surpassed 200,000 articles, an increase from 100,000 just 1 year ago. Join in on the celebrations. Some work has been done on predicting Wikipedia's growth and others are already planning for the 500,000 articles over all languages press release. In related news, the project has recently received $20,000 worth of Linux server equipment (9 machines) in hopes to improve performance of the site, which has been prone to downtime over the past year. The servers are being tested right now and will be up and running soon. The purchase was made possible by the many donations the Wikimedia project received in 2003."

Comments

with my karma whore hat on...

[anarcat]

Note that the folks mentionned something about not telling Slashdot about this news item, in order to survive the day. Thanks for nothing again, /.!

Wikipedia:Celebrating 200,000

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

And the prize for the 200,000th article on the English language Wikipedia goes to:

20:42, Feb 1, 2004 Neil Warnock (196 bytes) . . User:SimonMayer

Congratulations to all Wikipedians. Today is a great day.

Table of contents [showhide]
1 Useful Pages
2 Size matters
3 Getting the word out
1 Slashdot

Useful Pages

* In the true spitit of Wikipedia, I'd help Wikipedia by expanding it, but I don't know anything about football. fabiform | talk 02:06, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

* For those who are interested, you might want to check out Wikipedia:Modelling Wikipedia's growth. Very interesting read. Raul654 02:18, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)

Size matters
congrats! (and lets go on to 250,000...) TeunSpaans

Talk about shooting low. According to Modeling wikipedia's growth link, that should happen in June, 2004 ;) Raul654 02:39, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)

The index of the print version of Encyclopedia Brittannica contains approximately 750,000 entries, if I remember correctly. That's about four times our present article count. How about that as a short-term goal? -- Seth Ilys 02:48, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If that is the case, we'd better rise more money to buy servers. -- Taku 02:58, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)

That number seems high - 750,000. The whole set of print encyclopedias only has 65,000 entries, according to [1] Fuzheado 04:26, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Not right. The 2004 Encyclopedia Britannica has 65,000 articles. It may still very well have 750,000 entries in its index. --mav

I understand the distinction. I should have said 65,000 "articles" but didn't since Britannica calls them entries, not articles. Nevertheless, 750,000 "index entries" doesn't seem in sync with 65,000 articles. I'm no data mining expert, so I'd like to see a source for the "750,000." Fuzheado 05:05, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Just looked in one of my textbooks (Introduction to Reference Work, Katz, v. 1, p. 227) where I was recalling the stat from. Accoring to its comparison table for major encyclopeias; the 2000 print Brittannica has 790,000 index entries (I was off by 40,000). The largest article count it lists is the 2000 online Britannica at 83k. I assume those stats came (originally) from the publisher. Most of the index items listed in Britannica don't have dedicated entries of their own; they're people or places or concepts that might get one or two mentions in some other 500-1000 word article essay. We can create dedicated entries for each of those that aren't subordinate to any other topic or article. I felt it might be a useful comparison point, one it looks like we might reach (at present growth rates) in about two years (at about five years from Wikipedia's birth). -- Seth Ilys 07:57, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. Yes, it would be interesting to try creating an automated index, but I suspect that Google and a search engine obviates the need for actually creating an exhaustive alphabetical list. It would be interesting nonetheless. -- Fuzheado 08:01, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Getting the word out
Ok, question - has anyone outside of wikipedia actually noticed? I added a couple geek friendly Featured articles to the main page in anticipation of a slashdotting (for the record, my submission was shot down in 2 minutes flat). Raul654 08:04, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)

Please don't - that would kill the second hand server that we are now using. Things are slow enough as it is. We should concentrate on the project-wide 500,000 press release instead. By the time we hit that milestone, the new server farm should be up and running. --mav 08:08, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

OK, keep slashdot out. For the