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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."
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. "
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.
loganavatar.com
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:
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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.
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....
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
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.