Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Hits 300,000 Articles
Raul654 writes "Today Wikipedia reached the 300,000 article mark. Wikipedia is a 3-year-old non-profit project to build an encyclopedia using WikiWiki software. All text is licensed under the GFDL. It has everything that a traditional encyclopedia would, but also many things that would never get written about, such as Crushing by elephant and the GNU/Linux naming controversy. For size comparisons, the English Wikipedia has 90.1 million words across 300,000 articles, compared to Britannica's 55 million words across 85,000 articles. (All the languages combined together reach 790,000 articles.) For much of the first half of 2004, Wikipedia's growth has outstripped server capacity - however, the shortage of PHP/MySQL developers is probably the biggest long term problem facing the project. Slashdot had previously reported when Wikipedia reached the 200,000 mark."
w00t? No link?
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
I never understood why the government didn't fund more projects like this.
Because the last thing that any government wants is a well educated population to question their actions. Large groups of simple people can be controlled very easily. Various religions have been doing it for centuries.
The more a population can think for themselves, the harder they are to control.
You obviously have no idea just how much government money goes into research and academic projects of all sorts. The government is probably the most impartial funding agency out there - moreso with NSF as opposed to DoD, of course.