Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Reaches 1,000,000 Articles
AndrewRUK writes "At 23:09 UTC, the one-millionth article was created in the English-language Wikipedia. The milestone was reached with the creation of an article about Jordanhill railway station in Scotland. Congratulations to all the Wikipedians, especially Nach0king who wrote the millionth article and Mészáros András who in November 2004 correctly predicted that it would be created today."
Yes, but how many are stubs or redirects[...]?
Over 2.5 million. The Statistics page only counts real articles, which they define as a non-redirect, main namespace page with at least one link to another page.
I can help you out there. See Wikipedia's oldest articles. Long story short - the edits prior to phase II were lost - the page histories simply don't go back that far. (Some portion of them were later recovered, but the main pages ones were not)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
The article count jumped from 999,990 to 1,000,150 in one second. I never saw anything like it. Luckily, the devs were doing a dump and were able to sort out which one had won. By the numbers:
* 999,996 Bobby Smith (baseball player)
* 999,997 Temporal coding
* 999,998 Steve Cox
* 999,999 One million articles
* 1,000,000 Jordanhill railway station
* 1,000,001 Squidoo
* 1,000,002 Tennessee Commissioner of Financial Institutions
* 1,000,003 Aaron Ledesma
* 1,000,004 Cellular architecture
If it makes the GP poster feel any better, 999,999 was a joke.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
1,000,000 articles in English.
If you take all articles in all languages, Wikipedia surpassed the magic number a long time ago, and has by now actually gone beyond 2,000,000 articles.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
"On Wikipedia, the reward for a job well done is another three jobs." -- David Gerard's law
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I have a paid subscription to britannica.com. I don't ever use it because of wikipedia. Quite simply the articles on wiki ae:
1) longer
2) more in depth
3) have better links for follow up
4) over a wider range of topics
Every time I look something up in EB I find it doesn't have the information I'm looking for. About 20% of the time wikipedia has the information and another 30% or so it has high quality links that get me the information.
...and I'm not sure he reads Slashdot often, but I'm his brother and I do. He sent me this when he first found out he'd got the millionth post:
m p_(news)#The_millionth_article
;)
:)
[23:11:08] Nachoking: [23:11] [[Jordanhill railway station]] - 23:09, 1 March 2006 Nach0king
[23:11:09] Nachoking: holy shit
[23:11:11] Nachoking: if that's true
[23:11:22] Nachoking: IT IS
[23:11:25] Nach0king: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pu
I'm not sure if I could hear cheering from his room or not.
He was excited and pleased to have posted the millionth article, but it's only one of _many_ articles he's submitted, corrected or restored since becoming a Wikipedian. I think he'd be the first to admit that the millionth article, in itself, isn't that important. It is just a milestone symbolising the massive body of work that he and the other million or so Wikipedians have given and continue to give to the Internet community.
I'll show him this page when he gets up and maybe he'll register an account and post something.
Our net connection is up and down this morning thanks to NTL performing "network optimisation" otherwise I'd have posted sooner. When I saw the Slashdot warning on Nach0king's Wikipedia talk page I was pretty surprised.
Nach0king (Ewan Macdonald, 1m milestone poster) will be on BBC News 24 at around 5.50pm GMT talking about Wikipedia. Switch over if you want to watch it (and are in the UK, or receive UK channels :)