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

How nice to be asked

[alnapp]

I use Wikipedia often and find it an excellant starting point for most questions and would actively encourage anyone else who does to help the fundraiser.
I like the fund raising approach as it will allow them to be useful and ad free.

Can you think of any other sites who might've benefited from this user friendly approach?

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[gowen]

The Wikipedia is not an authoritative source.

Well, duh. Now then, I'd like you to tell me who is and authoritative source.

before you ask

[mandalayx]

before you ask how wikipedia will *ever* work by allowing everybody to write, take a look at this quote:

According to a Wall Street Journal article from February 2004, researchers have found that there are frequent instances of vandalism at Wikipedia, but that these are often quickly resolved:

"Recent research by a team from IBM found that most vandalism suffered by Wikipedia had been repaired within five minutes. That's fast: 'We were surprised at how often we found vandalism, and then surprised again at how fast it was fixed,' says Martin]Wattenberg, a researcher in the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, in Cambridge, Mass." [7]

-source

Congrats to Wikipedia for the 1 millionth entry...and (less easily measured) even more interesting, deep, and thoughtful articles.

Re:Yes

[gowen]

Maybe you should give an actual example to give some substance to your concern.

You've greatly misinterpreted the original poster. It *looks* like he has some intelligent concerns, but from the superficiality of his comments, its pretty clear that he's more interested in getting a (+5 Not Completely Idiotic) near the top of the comments page.

um.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

It is hardly surprising to know that all of the vandalism that is *found* is fixed quickly.

The serious question is: how good is the quality of information in the typical wikipedia article? That's the question that you'll see all the fanatics avoid frantically, either by pretending to have answered it ("it gets better all the time"), by blaming the critic ("that's *your* fault for not spending 3 hours a week editing Wikipedia!"), or just saying something completely unrelated ("...whenever somebody notices obvious vandalism 5 minutes after the fact, they revert it right away").

Congratulations.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

The poster you respond to links to a piece on how somebody managed to vandalize a Wikipedia article really easily and go undetected, and you respond with a canned "vandalism in Wikipedia gets corrected quickly" response.

It's even worse, because the piece that the poster linked was written to debunk the sort of canned response that you offer. To rephrase the "discussion":

[Grandparent poster]: "Contrary to Wikipedia zealots' insistence that vandalism in Wikipedia is corrected almost instantly, I can demonstrate that it's really easy to do it in such a way that survives for many days."

[You]: "Vandalism in Wikipedia is corrected almost instantly!"

Wikipedia is a great research tool...

[Venti]

... BUT, you absolutely CAN NOT use it for reference, especially for school purposes and stuff (well, in practise you can, and no one will care, but its not right). Not because the info can be inaccurate or plain wrong, but because the dynamic nature of Wikipedia. The content of the page you are referring to can be changed at any time by anybody, wich means that you could just as well refer to some random chalkboard at your school, wich happened to have some piece of information at some given time.

Re:Wikipedia is a great research tool...

[Anonymous Coward]

(well, in practise you can, and no one will care, but its not right)

When I was writing a diploma on image transforms and desperately needed a source to tell me not only the math part, but also what the transforms are typically used for, Wikipedia saved me. I did tread through a couple dozen books and more than half the relevant web trying to find a more "credible" source, but Wikipedia simply was best. My profs apparently agreed, and nothing can be more "right" than that.

The only source error I ever found in my reearch was on an (otherwise informative) website. If that had been in Wikipedia, I'd have corrected the mistake. As it is, the mistake is still there to mislead people who don't refer to the (correct) Wikipedia article.

Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs?

[ceeam]

Or do they? (I have not found).
At $15-25 a disc they could've get enough money to maintain it IMHO. It hurts me when I see free projects begging with the bowl. :(

Re:Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs?

[Shinglor]

A DVD would be obsolete the second it was created. It goes against the whole idea of Wikipedia.

An invaluable resource

[nimid]

I've often turned to Wikipedia when I'm looking something up. It's indepth, it's interesting and it's checked by hundreds of people BUT at the back of my mind I always wonder if someone's deliberately tried to influence the information I'm looking up.

I'm friends with someone in marketing for a _large_ multi-national organisation and I know for a fact that they use upwards of 50 people in their marketing campaigns to visit websites to post innacurate information. "Buy product X. It's better than product Y. I've used it and it's true!"

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?

The more popularity WikiP is the more likely this sort of disinformation will become.

Just my paranoia probably but the possibility for it is there. I realise other information sources are suceptible to this form of manipulation too but it's worth bearing it in mind when you're researching with WikiP as I know many assume the information is valid because it's checked by 'many eyeballs'!

Re:An invaluable resource

[nimid]

I did a bit more asking around...

I found out that it's quite "common practice". Also, the 50 users are paid to "discuss" and "promote" the product. I don't believe there's ever any mention of astroturfing but it's heavily implied in the way bonuses are made and also from the supervisors who look after each team.

It's not right.

A product should be bought based on it's merits but how will you ever find out if it's worthy of your Dollars/Euros/Yuan/Dinars?

The worst aspect of this sort of marketing is that the very action of combating this is the very action that makes it so successful - vote with your wallet and buy the product that you hear is the best for the job...

Are you Al Fastold or are you just quoting him?

[presroi]

In the latter case, please start to quote the passages which are not written by you.

Librarian: Don't use Wikipedia as source

It's not the online version of an established, well-researched traditional encyclopedia. Instead, Wikipedia is a do-it-yourself encyclopedia, without any credentials. [...] One of these skills is to evaluate the authority of any information source. The Wikipedia is not an authoritative source. It even states this in their disclaimer on their Web site." (quoting of Sue Stagnitta)

Journalist: Wikipedia is "outrageous," "repugnant" and dangerous"

and

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20040825/0238210. shtml

Actually, I like this Syracuse Post Standard-rant because it led into a quality check by Edward Felte.

fundraiser

[Krafty Koder]

"Still, it takes money to run such an amazing resource, and so they are running a fundraiser. The goal is to raise $50,000." why dont they use Google Adsense?

The really interesting pages...

[caluml]

The really interesting pages are the ones that have had to be protected due to vandalism or flame wars. Ie the ones that get people really annoyed/are controversial :)

Look right down at the bottom

Re:So what?

[gowen]

Well, have you tried searching with -wikipedia in your search terms???

Fool.

Slashdot effect

[traffi]

A good thing about Wikipedia is that it has entries that won't make it to other more "respected" sources until much later. This is good for all sorts of cultural phenomenons, especially web/technical related.

An example is The Slashdot Effect.

If Wikipedia's entry for the Effect would suffer from it after being discussed here, the world would certainly implode in a puff of poetic logic would it not?

Re:Slashdot effect

[imsabbel]

Most interestingly, wikipedia is almost 100% slashdot resistent.
First, they have more traffic than slashdot to begin with. (By now, it should be A LOT MORE).
Second, they use a squid array to dynamically cache requests. Its a 3 layer system: Database->Apache->Squid. If a lot of traffic goes to the same article, the requests wont even reach the apaches... (and you would need A TON of people to overload the squids, because even at 80% caching efficiency 1000hits/s dont crash them)

Re:Yes

[bhima]

I guess it depends on the use: my Daughter uses it for homework, I use it on slashdot as reference. But it's not like we're using in court or anything. I guess journalists are at the biggest risk, but judging from some of the crap I see in print I don't suppose they care.

Here's a metric.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

One misorganized article filled with half-truths and omissions, written by people who don't know better, overrides three well-written articles. Misinformation is far more costly than lack of information. This is one of the reasons that a real encyclopedia has far fewer articles than the Wikipedia-- because editing means not letting crap into the work.

wikimedia for law school

[_critic]

I've been using the wikimedia software for briefing and note-taking at law school. It's perfect for the job. The syntax for links, outlining, highlighting, etc is simple and really perfect for the job. Not to mention the automatic toc, searches, etc . . .

I don't understand why anyone would use word, or oneNote for that matter (which a lot of my peers do). For my money (free!), wikimedia beats 'em all hands down.

Anyone else using this tech for school?

Re:Yes

[The Grassy Knoll]

Yes, but two things:

If you use the Random Page link, you very often get a place in the US, which makes me wonder how much of the wikipedia consists of these entries!

There used to be a mention in the Southern Sri Lanka page of the Mexican Staring Frog, which as any fuly kno is a fictional animal from South Park. I removed the reference, but how much more crud is there in there?

.

Fundraising slashdot effect

[tines]

I wonder if the fundraising will get a huge increase in donations due to slashdot or just plain bandwidth loss. A graph with donation / visitors would be nice for today.

Re:Yes

[ImaLamer]

For the things I'm interested in, Wikipedia tends to be the best thing to use.

This is where I agree and disagree.

Sure, Wikipedia can get you information on the stuff you're interested in.

The coolest thing is (IMHO) that you can find out about topics you never knew you had interests in. This is the cool thing about any wiki. The ability to link pages that have nothing to do with each other can open the reader's eyes to new topics.

I find myself browsing Wikipedia all day sometimes reading about things I care nothing about because it's cool to at least check it out.

Re:Yes

[gowen]

It's never been the encyclopedia that Slashdot built

Bollocks, mate. I was a wikipedian before you, and remember the days when it was Ayn Rand, the Jargon File, so don't patronise me with alternative histories.

Win $$$ using Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

Last week on the Oz version of who wants to be a millionaire, wikipedia was used via phone-a-friend for a substantial reward to the contestant (perhaps a wikipedia donation is in order).
FYI charolais is indeed a breed of cattle.

Wikipedia helped me

[Lairdsville]

Wikipedia is a terrific medium for obscure and specialised information that would not be of interest to a publisher of a traditional encyclopedia.

As and example, my daughter was recently diagnosed with an extremely rare condition called Opsoclonus Myoclonus Syndrome. It only effects about 1 in 10,000,000 people per year, so you can imagine the difficulty we had finding information and medical practitioners who knew anything about it. I searched the Web and found lots of information and other people with the same condition, but it took a long time to find what I wanted and the information was fragmented and often very old, but eventually I knew more that any of the medical specialists we have been seeing. I wanted to share my knowledge, so I build my own web site, played with a blog, but then it hit me, Wikipedia! So created the OMS page and put all of the knowledge I had collected into it. My daughter will get better and we will forget the horrible episode, but the wikipedia page will live and grow and continue to help people long after I stop maintaining it.

This sort of information is only going to be accessed by small number of people, but it will be extremely valueable. Thanks Wikipedia!

Re:Yes

[tony_gardner]

Traditional works have several advantages over wiki works.

1. Versioning: If I say I got something from the 1975 Encyclopaedia Brittanica, you can go and check that I got my reference right. Then you can check if the fact was right in that version. With wiki, if I say I got it from the 20.2.2002 wiki, simply finding out if I got the quote right can be a problem.

2. Continuity: Most books fix errors as the version number increases. There is no gaurantee of continuity in the wiki system.

3. Editorship: Most other sources have clear lines about which author is responsible for a whole article, and one person who is responsible for seeing that facts are preserved and false statements are reviewed. There is no clear line of responsibility in a wiki article.

These three things make wikipedia less reliable than other media (but no less reliable than any other website)

Re:Before you say ..

[tony_gardner]

So what you're saying is that wikipedia is good because it has the potential to be good some time in the future? I think that wikipedia does have its strengths, but the current version of wiki is not that version, so there's not much point in arguing the greatness of wiki is in its system, when what that system has currently produced is a large number of articles which are so short as to be scarcely worth the name, a large number of articles which include partially/wholly untrue sections and a small number of really great articles.

My gut feeling is that the split is about 50/40/10, but perhaps you have better information. Until the wikipedia consists largely of verified information, its value remains greatly diminished.

Authorative Source? Soon!

[Famatra]

Wikipedia is currently working to reference all the facts on it. There is a project set up to do it also here Fact and Reference Check [wikipedia.org]. Here is a quote:

Not only can we make Wikipedia a more factual, a more reputable, source of information but perhaps the *most*. Imagine an article in which each *fact* is referenced with many academic text books, journals and websites! Wikipedia has the potential to be the *most* crossreferenced body of knowledge ever created, but to get there it needs help.

There isn't any reason why every fact couldn't be referenced making Wikipedia one of the most authoritative sources of information ever created.

There is still discussion on how best to do this so feel free to join up. Also feel free to encourage the people who write the Wikimedia program too add in this tab feature (don't encourage too hard though, they are volunteers :o) )

My Biggest Complaint

[Relic of the Future]

My biggest complaint about Wikipedia is that I'm seeing a growing number of articles that seem to be written more to impress the authors peers than to inform.

For example, I was reading some articles about music theory the other day (something I kno^Kew nothing about), and it was *dense* like a brick. If the point of the articles were to educate, then they were failing; they were describing beginner-level information, but they were doing it in a way that goes over the heads of most beginers.

I've noticed the same thing happening to some articles I've helped with. I try to write in a way that's accessible to the layman, but then later some self-important expert comes by and adds extra minutiae that obfuscate the points of the article, extra un-explained un-linked vocabulary that confuses the reader, and meaningless tangents that distract from the focus.

It's hard to keep up (and so, I haven't been). But please, keep my words in mind when editing! Particularly if you wrote the bits on music theory. Remember, you're writing to educate BEGINERS, not to impress your peers with how much trivia and jargon you know.

Wikipedia needs spell-check

[whyde]

Last week I found a simple speling error in the entry for Rosh Hashanah. After fixing that, I searched for pages with the same word mispelled the same way, and fixed four more.

It really was a brain-dead speling mistake, too, and a simple check presenting a list of possibly mispelled words before confirming a check-in would be a big help.

Re:speaking of which...

[Ponderoid]

Actually, the "mostly harmless" bit was already in the article, scroll to the bottom. Your change was quickly reverted.
*** Ponder

This is on my next to donate to list

[aardwolf204]

Last Christmas my G/F got me a Slashdot T-Shirt from Thinkgeek. (Yes I am a /.er with a GF) I wear it proudly (except on dupe days) and often times people ask me what the T-Shirt means and I get to share the wonderfulness that is Slashdot.

Today I donated to FireFox, actually I got one of the new T-Shirts and some stickers to put on my car but that counts right? It felt great. Sure it was a bit much for a T-Shirt, but I know that the profit is going to something I actually care about and I can only imagine how happy I will feel wearing that shirt around town, speaking the word of mozilla to all who ask about my shirt.

Next on my list to donate to is the EFF, and I think I get a nifty bumper sticker for that too.

I really want to donate to wikipedia, I use it all the time. I find myself getting bored, then researching something random on wikipedia, and an hour later I've got 50 tabs open in FireFox and I'm super happy. I just thought I would point out to everyone that Wikipedia has T-Shirts available at cafepress.com/wikipedia.

Ok, enjoy the rest of your day.