Wikipedia Reaches Half a Million Articles

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."

Comments

500,000th Article

[tabkey12]

Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union

Re:I always find the quantity of non-english artic

[pbranes]

Wikipedia is a living example of how information demands to be free. This has already taken place for a long time in the scientific community, and wikipedia extends that idea to everyone on the internet.

Infoworld is going to hate this, but...

[aftk2]

One of the more interesting overviews of wikipedia, and wikis in general - something that you can send to someone non-tech-savvy who doesn't really understand the idea of a collaborative web page - can be found here:

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html

Basically, shows how the "Heavy Metal Umlaut" (heh) page at wikipedia has evolved over some time. Interesting stuff. Note: This is a flash movie, although when it comes up, if your browser window isn't tall enough, it'll probably just look like a web page. Scroll down for the play/stop/back controls.

Example from Leipzig Book Fair

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I am Mathias Schindler, a German Wikipedian. I'm currently at the Wikipedia Booth at the Leipzig Book Fair (Hall 2, H 104).

Currently, around 40% of the book fair visitors I spoke to knew about wikipedia as such. At CeBIT last week, the figures went up to 85% of all the visitors.

Okay, a book fair visitor is not Joe Sixpack from your local trailor park but I was surprised to that so many non-Wikipedians already know us.

Your mileage may vary....

73% are over 0.5KB

[dannytaggart]

From the data table, 73% of English-language articles are over 0.5KB.

Re:How widely is Wikipedia known?

[templest]

Here in Canada, everyone migrated from Google to Wikipedia a long time ago. At least in my High School, which hardly represents all of Canada, but it's amusing to see all the "gangstas" flipping through Wikipedia for their history assignments, even if it is only to copy+paste... but tho teachers already know about it as well so hah. Any ways, yeah... pretty popular where I'm from.

I'm curious.

[Grendel Drago]

You know, it's shitty that you got modded down as Flamebait. Because I occasionally see posts like this and I immediately wonder how and where they happen. I've made several thousand edits, and have had someone revert them perhaps once or twice. Maybe this means I'm in line with the groupthink over there, but more likely it's that I make a lot of copyediting and nitpicking edits, not controversial ones.

I strongly urge you to show me the diffs where you got reverted. If you don't know how to do that, tell me the date and the article name and a vague idea of what you contributed (or, better, the username you used if you were logged in), and I'll have a look.

A lot of new editors do get reverted, because a lot of them write "GOATSE ROCKZORZ" on Ollie North's article to feel the power of "do you mean that when I hit submit, it's immediately visible to everyone?!".

Now, I'm not saying that's what you did. And if a good edit got reverted, I want to know about it, because I believe in the project and it pisses me off when that happens. So... show me the edits, or at least the way to them.

--grendel drago