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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."
For instance, over 200,000 articles in German
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All special users link not working....
Guess they weren't all that special eh.
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union
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192,584 of those are related to David Hasselhoff, of which 29,219 are related to Knight Rider.
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.
How widely is it known? I bet a good number of people know Google or Yahoo or MSN once mentioned...question is: If one went to the street and asked the ordinary Joe Six Pack about Wikipedia I doubt there would be more than 1% who have even heard of it. In Toronto where I am now, people seem to think that the world is just made of the big players in every field. Just made a call to a university lecturer here...he's never used Wikipedia and does not even know what goes on at its site! Liking up with Google might help here.
"Wikipedia is a living example of how information demands to be free. "
SSN#:
LET ME OUT! I CAN'T BREATH!
... 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.
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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:
l
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.htm
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.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
A better question is: How accurate is it?
As the old saying goes, "Just because you've been doing it for 30 years, doesn't mean you've been doing it right all those years".
I don't know about spam, but none of these are "Stubs". As per TFA: Wikipedia currently has 501783 articles. That number excludes discussion pages, articles without links to other articles, very short ("stub") articles and pages about Wikipedia. Including these, we have 1405147 pages.
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....
Wikipedia is a fascinating experiment in public education. Its quality certainly debunks the myth that centralized authority is the only way to ensure that quality. But who decides the accuracy? If two people have very different definitions of a controversial subject, like "terrorists" vs. "freedom fighters" for a single guerilla group, which becomes "definitive"? Who decides whether unproven scientific theories, like early versions of string theory, are "science", or "pseudoscience"? If I post an article, clearly linked, reporting a new scientific discovery, are the "wikipeers" qualified to process the "peer review" that filters most scientific reports? Central editorial authority is certainly no guarantee of accuracy, but is P2P editorial even less accountable, even less reliable?
--
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From the data table, 73% of English-language articles are over 0.5KB.
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
Some even became Anonymous Cowards on /.
Search for "cow" on wikipedia. Of course you will find a blurb that a cow is a female of the bovine family. It also says:
COW is also an acronym for copy-on-write, a technique in computer science
I mean come on! There are a zillion acronyms for the word cow.
Wikipedia is edited by too many techy people and this could hurt its reputation.
Here's a wikipedia article involving slashdot. Karma_Whore
Some info on what Karma Whore's goals are. Karma Whore has three stated purposes: to post information about a topic that everyone already knows; to link to wikipedia, because wikipedia pwns
Oh damn, now I'm in a loop
Business Voyeur
But how can this Wikipedia thing exist if it is not listed in Encyclopedia Britannica, which, since its authors say is better, must surely be the authoritative guide to everything?
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.
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.
Britannica? Be kind. I grew up trying to read cover to cover the leather-bound editions my parents bought for me (I share your bias), and while today I scoff at anything in written form that's less than 5,000 words, I firmly believe Wikipedia is an excellent resource.
I get access to Brittanica's website through my SBC account. The books are just a few feet from me. That said, I've rarely bothered with either when I needed some information. Put another way, Wikipedia is just too easy. And for any subject that doesn't age well (anything technology related, for example), Wikipedia shines.
On the other hand, If I'm looking to read an extended on an obscure subject, then maybe I'll reach for the appropriate volume and pour myself a drink of something that does age well. Or I'll buy book on the subject and skip Britannica altogther.
The only thing I havent' found online for which I insist on authoritative information are dictionary lookups. The rubbish found on dictionary.com, Webster's, etc. is a poor substitute for owning some form the OED to browse.
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
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Go to wikipedia everyday and add ONE fact, correct ONE misspelling, or add ONE reference. Don't make more than one change per article per day. Don't make any change you can't back up with a quote (in other words, no opinions, no original research). Provide the reference with your fact. Use EDIT to see how things are done, like the use of brackets for linking.
You will get hooked. You will love making a difference.
Once you learn your way around the place, throw away anything I just said you you don't like.
If you are afraid of making a mistake, do everything anonomously.
On behalf of compulsive readers of information on the Internet, I'd like to say: Thanks a lot, I waste more time on your site than anywhere else! I sit down and read some article, and before I know it, I've got another 8 tabs open with crosslinks to other Wikipedia articles, and another hour has come and gone.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
... but the two-letter abbreviations are ISO 639 language names, not (an obsolete) ISO 3166 country code (which also are used as internet domain name suffixes). This is why the English wikipedia is en.wikipedia.org, not us, uk or au. Or nz, I suppose. Languages don't map nicely to countries; there are languages that span many countries (English), countries with more than one official language (Switzerland) and languages with no country (Esperanto).
In this case, "su" refers to the Sundanese language. You probably wanted to link to the Russian Wikipedia, with ISO-639-2 code 'ru'.
Happy to help!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
500,000 full-length articles... with well over 25% factually correct!
Which makes it a LOT better than broadcast and print news media. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That sounds pretty odd. Nothing like the Wikipedia I know. How about linking to the edits you made, and the user talk page where you were warned to quit it? Your comment is almost like an accusation, so some evidence would appropriate.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
Your mileage may vary....
Your kilometerage may vary?
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
Perhaps this isn't the answer you were looking, for but here is an independent audit of Britannica, showing errors that have been corrected in Wikipedia.
The point of the audit is not, I think, that Wikipedia is an authoritative source and Britannica is not. It is, rather, that if you think a source is infallible, or even vaguely infallible, you're fooling yourself.
Furthermore, Britannica doesn't have anything comparable to the Countering Systemic Bias project.
But you do have a point. I would like to see external audits of Wikipedia's featured articles versus their Britannica equivalents (though I doubt Britannica has an article about the heavy metal umlaut), and comparing that to an audit of random non-stub articles at least six months old versus their Britannica equivalents, and comparing that to an audit of random articles from the entire pool.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca