Wikipedia Hits Million-Entry Mark

Sir Homer writes "The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the one millionth article in Wikipedia. Started in January 2001, Wikipedia is currently both the world's largest encyclopedia and fastest-growing, with articles under active development in over 100 languages. Nearly 2,500 new articles are added to Wikipedia each day, along with ten times that number of updates to existing articles. Wikipedia now ranks as one of the ten most popular reference sites on the Internet, according to Alexa.com. It is increasingly used as a resource by students, journalists, and anyone who needs a starting point for research. Wikipedia's rate of growth has continued to increase in recent months, and at its current pace Wikipedia will double in size again by next spring." stevejobsjr writes "Wikipedia needs our help. The Wikipedia project has no ads, and is run completely by volunteers. Still, it takes money to run such an amazing resource, and so they are running a fundraiser. The goal is to raise $50,000."

Comments

Before you say ..

[Eloquence]

• .."why should I trust Wikipedia, it's written by random people"?
• .."there's been a successful experiment of inserting false information..."
• "the neutral point of view doesn't work"
• "it's just an encyclopedia .."

Please read this:

Wikipedia has now hit another quantitative milestone (we reached 500,000 articles in the same year). It is now clear that volunteers can build a free, structured information resource which rivals all such proprietary resources. This is an accomplishment of immense importance, but it is not the end goal.

Article review

Wikipedia is not perfect yet. But from day one, we've been thinking about and tinkering with quality control mechanisms. The one which is currently in active use is the Featured Article Candidates nomination process as well as the Votes for deletion negative equivalent. There's also a peer review page which is in active use.

These are just trial balloons. They're not the end product, the peer review process which we need. There's a WikiProject Fact and Reference Check formed to explore a review system centered around individual factual statements in an article. I have also proposed such a system. There's also an article rating system that is currently in the CVS version of MediaWiki, our free wiki software.

We are all aware of the problem, and we all know that we have to fix this problem before Wikipedia can be a trusted authority. Doing this kind of systematic quality review will require the same level of dedication and effort as creating the encyclopedia in the first place. But we will do it, and not too far from now you will read "1000 reviewed articles", "10000 reviewed articles" announcements, and so on. And this review will be more in-depth than the review process of any traditional encyclopedia, because it will be done by thousands of volunteers from all political and religious persuasions.

There will always be an unstable edition of Wikipedia where you can go to read the latest information, with a big caveat lector sign on the front door. But we will also build a stable edition which we will distribute to the entire planet.

Neutrality

The Neutral Point of View is our guiding principle. However, that does not mean that it is the only way to write articles. Because Wikipedia's content is free, you can take it and start a fork that is written using a different methodology.

There's Wikinfo, which presents a "sympathetic point of view" on the main article, and critical views on separate pages. There's Disinfopedia and dKosopedia, which makes use of some of our content and develop it from a political/progressive perspective.

We will support dynamic cross-project transclusion of our content so that it will be easy to set up a project fork with a different policy. Wikipedia will always be the largest knowledge repository, but if you want the "truth" from a particular point of view, you will be able to consult a resource that is written by people who share that point of view. You can start such a fork right now if you want to - just download the database and get going.

It's more than an encyclopedia

The Wikimedia Foundation currently operates Wikip

Re:Who here has contributed?

[ImaLamer]

I've contributed, but it's easy.

I don't be having the best grammar, or anything, but a simple edit here and there can really help.

Take for example a article about the city where I live. For most (or all) cities there are lists of famous people from that city. I noticed some obscure, but a few notable, people were left out. All I had to do was stick them in there with a few brackets around their names and Viola!

An easy way to get started is to look for stub articles and go from there. Many times the stub articles have related information already on Wikipedia. And many times the information can be gathered from the Internet and texts you already own. Grab a book of the shelf and write about the topic in your own words. See, you don't have to be the expert - people have already written volumes on most subjects.

Another way to get started with stub pages is to find a stub that has an official website. This article is a good example. Even biography stubs are good candidates for this considering most actors (for example) have their own web sites today. Earlier I noticed that Lou Rawls was a stub page. I simply put his official page as an "External Link" and listed it on "pages needing attention" with a note and link telling everyone that he has an official bio. While the page isn't beautiful at this point it is starting out.

One last way to start out is just by surfing around reading things your interested in. If you notice that "Star Wars" links to "Luke Skywalker" but not the other way around then you can fix that. If you notice a sentence misworded or a word spelled wrong you can fix that too.

I'd recommend creating a user name because this allows you to later on claim certain articles as your own. By this I mean; even though you aren't the expert now, you could be someday. Imagine adding that to your resume. "I've created 150 articles for the Internet's free encyclopedia project" or something to that effect. It can help explain what you've been doing between jobs. Looks like charity work almost.

Even input on Wikipedia's discussion pages can help. There are several articles that seemed weird or unclear to me and all I did was suggest another route. It's worked in a few cases. Sometimes editors just need another point of view.

Re:Yes

[Eloquence]

It's never been the encyclopedia that Slashdot built. Everything2 is. In fact, before there was Everything2, there was everything.slashdot.org. The code was created by some of the same people as Slashdot, and so was a content. For a while, Slashdot used to link to E2 articles using "[?]" links. Of course, unlike Wikipedia articles, you can't just start to improve them. Everything2 is a very geeky system that takes a long time to grok, with a complex, role-playing style experience model that hooks people.

Wikipedia started out as the progeny of Nupedia, a very serious, peer-reviewed encyclopedia which managed to produce all of two dozen articles. If you look at the Wayback Machine in July 2001, you will find that Wikipedia early on was actually quite philosophy-centric (in part because the original, full-time chief editor, Larry Sanger, is a philsopher).

Of course we have Slashdot readers among our editors, including myself. But we also have credentialed experts and amateurs from many different fields. We try to make it as easy as possible to join in, and many people who know nothing about computers do. If you (the reader, not the parent poster) know a way to make Wikipedia easier to use, please do not hesitate to submit a feature request.

We don't go around deleting articles on geeky subjects if they're well-written and encyclopedic. But Wikipedia never aimed exclusively at a nerdy audience and its editors were never made up exclusively of members of that audience.

Re:Yes

[Eloquence]

When was the last time you read a story about Ayn Rand on Slashdot? The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is an objectivist (highly active participant in the We the Living objectivism portal, check the Atlantis archive, also do a groups.google search), and so are many of his friends, therefore there was a strong libertarian/objectivist bent to Wikipedia articles in the early days. That has nothing to do with "the encyclopedia that Slashdot built" type nonsense. These people didn't come from Slashdot. These are the people that started Wikipedia.

The Jargon file was one of the early sets of data that was imported. This highlights a general problem with importing data, in that large sets of data imported from a single source may skew the overall impression of Wikipedia in one direction or another, without that impression necessarily being based on any real inherent bias. It's just like saying "Wikipedia is made of US census fans".

I've first edited Wikipedia articles about half a year after it started and am quite familiar with the project's history.

Re:Yes

[ricotest]

Wikipedia has a policy on bots that, while largely negative, allows limited use of bots for certain things.

One example is that a whole bunch of articles from a 1911 dictionary were added. Another is that 30,000 US towns and cities were automatically added as stubs, with information being added later (basic information, such as state and population, were included I believe).

This might be useful: History of Wikipedia bots

30,000 is a chunk of 1 million, but not that large a chunk. You just might have been unlucky ;)

Re:An invaluable resource

[PenguiN42]

Now translate that to Wikipedia and select something that you want to influence. "Windows LongDredgeUphillWarrior 2043 is the best due to it's powerful features - etc". How much would it cost you to hire 10 people to 'maintain' this information for a year?

Here's what would probably happen in wikipedia:

1) These people would post this article.
2) Most people using wikipedia would recognize it as violating NPOV (neutral point of view)
3) The people editing would change the article to be more NPOV.
4) The hired "maintainers" would change it back.
5) Other people on wikipedia would change it back again.
6) An "edit war" would ensue, with the page rapidly being edited back and forth.
7) Someone would bring the edit war to the attention of a moderator.
8) The moderator would lock the page -- and put a disclaimer at the top noting that it was locked -- until the cause for the edit war was hashed out between the participating parties
9) It would eventually be determined that one or more of the "Maintatiners" were putting in the NPOV material on purpose.
10) These "maintainers" would be banned (by ip address), and the article would be deleted or unlocked (depending on its usefulness as an article)
11) Repeat until all the "maintainers" are banned.

The system works because there are more "good guys" than "bad guys", effectively.