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Wikipedia Reaches Half a Million Articles

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the everything-knockoffs dept.

Faraaz Damji (frazzydee) writes "The English Wikipedia has reached 500,000 full-length articles. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia collaboratively edited by thousands of users worldwide, and the article count has been increasing every day. Thanks to all the users who make it happen, especially the ones who put in hours every day writing to make this invaluable resource that we all love."

3 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. What impresses me most ... by LoganAvatar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... about wikipedia is not necessarily the number of articles or the quality (and it can be disputed that the quality is both good and bad), is that on top of the fact that to search and read the articles is free, they will also allow you to download the entire database, which i think is impressive in our information driven economy.

    --
    loganavatar.com
  2. Re:I always find the quantity of non-english artic by ozric99 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I don't know about that. This post's score will stay above 0 for about 30 seconds but I've got karma to burn so whatever. I've tried on no less than 7 occasions to make changes or additions to some rather innocuous pages only to return some moments later to a message telling me to stop defacing or trolling the site. I'm not talking about crazy political trolling or anything of that nature, merely additions of relevant links, changes to dates, spelling and grammar mistakes etc..

    Wikipedia isn't an example of information wanting to be free, it's an example of groupthink spinning out of control. Has it changed dramatically in the last few months? I may return if it has, but if not it's just another example of a failed ideology.

  3. What Wikipedia needs now by Taxman415a · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Many of you were probably already aware Wikipedia had reached 500,000 articles. What may be of even more interest to many Slashdot readers though is that the Wikimedia project that runs Wikipedia and other sites desperately needs more people to help run the site. Both to develop the software and administer the servers. The growth of Wikipedia is phenomenal and traffic is increasing at a rapid pace. However, without proper planning, the system will not be able to keep up with demand. The site gets over 80 million hits a day, so it would certainly be an interesting project to work on from a technical standpoint. Oh, and did I forget to say it runs on Linux?

    The other thing Wikipedia needs most is better referencing of facts. The only criticism left of Wikipedia is the percieved lack of reliability. The best (only?) way to combat this is to cite individual facts to the most authoritative source available. With that Wikipedia can be more reliable than any other single source available. Not perfect, because someone can dispute any fact, but Wikipedia might be able to be the best out there at it. There is certainly a lot of work going on in this area, but also many who write on Wikipedia fail to see the writing on the wall and reallize this really is the only valid criticism left. I for one am promoting work on a list of Wikipedia's otherwise best articles that do not cite their sources properly. If you want to contribute to something, researching and citing facts in these articles could be one of the most valuable things you could do.