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Wikipedia Hits Million-Entry Mark

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the and-hits-it-hard dept.

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."

5 of 348 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia. by gowen · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The Wikipedia is not an authoritative source.
    Well, duh. Now then, I'd like you to tell me who is and authoritative source.
    --
    Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
  2. before you ask by mandalayx · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.
  3. Slashdot effect by traffi · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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?

    --

    Treo + Kaffi = Traffi
  4. wikimedia for law school by _critic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  5. Wikipedia helped me by Lairdsville · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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!