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Wikipedia Reaches 1,000,000 Articles

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the where-were-you-when dept.

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."

7 of 257 comments (clear)

  1. Does size matter? by bcrowell · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The real challenge isn't the number of articles, it's their quality, especially the bad writing in a lot of them. Once an article reaches a certain level of quality, it actually tends to get worse over time, because of random, uncoordinated edits.

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    1. Re:Does size matter? by Khalid · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This not true, It's one of the Myths surrounding Wikipedia, there is absolutly no secret a good article has a lot of people intersted in it and a lot of editors too, who are constantly looking at modifications, reversing vandalism and stupidities. In my long Wikipedia experience I have rarely witnessed what you said. This myth needs to be debunked now !

      Granted that style is not the primary asset of Wikipedia, as many contributors have different writing abilities but overall the information is generally there, and that is all what people are looking for.

    2. Re:Does size matter? by sbaker · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There is some sense in which that's true.

      My main piece of work on Wiki is the 'Mini' article (it's hard to type it without square brackets around it!) - which is inching towards 'Featured Article' status - it's currently rated 'Good' - which means it's in the top 800 or so articles on the site.

      What I've noticed is this pattern:

      * Someone writes an eloquent paragraph about something.
      * 10 people notice teeny tiny additional bits of information that could be added to it (parenthetically), between commas - with hyphens. And just dumped in on the end of other sentences.
      * The paragraph now reads like crap.
      * Sometime later, someone cleans it up and makes it nice prose again.

      This cycle often repeats itself.

      There is also a terrible tendancy for "owners" of pages to 'tweak' the wording - that happens a lot too and I think the article tends to become 'stale' after a lot of that.

      The competition to make 'Featured Article' is a huge thing for quality. The process goes through many stages and the degree of intelligent critique you get at each stage is really good - invariably polite - always for the good. I plan to push everything I write until it at least gets a shot at that honored position.

      Vandalism is almost 100% restricted to 'big name' articles such as 'Computer', 'Lego', 'George Bush', etc which each end up being de-vandalised a couple of times every day. Fortunately, these all have hundreds of sets of eyes on them - so the 'revert' typically comes within just a few minutes of the vandalism. The actual probability of someone coming along at random and seeing a vandalised page are actually quite small.

      I monitor the 'Computer' page - and looking back at the HISTORY, I'd say we see three vandalisms a day fixed within 5 minutes (on the average). This means that the page is typically trashed for a total of 15 minutes a day - so you maybe only have about a 1% chance of seeing it when it's disrupted - and typically the distruption is VERY obvious - idiotic name calling and obscenity mostly.

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    3. Re:Does size matter? by syntaxglitch · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's not about looking good, it's about clarity. Good "style" in writing intended to be informative is anything that makes the information easier to read and digest, especially for people with little to no prior knowledge.

      If you think that's not useful, valuable, or necessary, well... I'm sorry for you, and suggest you might find a lucrative career in writing college textbooks.

  2. plagiarism, outdated sources and pure propaganda by netscott · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The reason Wikipedia is the leading free encylopedia is because somebody subsidized it with income from his soft-port business. It was built around republications of old encylopedias and automated reproduction of free atlases. To see where the majority of Wikipedia's geographic data came from check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rambot . Other content was contributed by undergrads paraphrasing class materials. What hasn't been forked or plagiarized is unreliable, though content forked from other sources creates an impression of credibility. Articles involving social topics are notoriously biased. Other topics are edited by paid advocates -- including corporate hacks and military personnel -- as a means of having their preferred view of the world reproduced on the hundreds of sites that fork Wikipedia content without questioning its merit. The arbitration processes at Wikipedia have nothing to do with qualifying content and everything to do with making sure people are "good Wikipedians." The much acclaimed "NPOV" (neutral point of view) is little more than a slogan tossed around by insiders as an alternative to reasoned discussion of content around well defined and consistently enforced editorial policies.

  3. Re:plagiarism, outdated sources and pure propagand by netscott · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Here's a glass of 80 percent water and 20 percent strychnine. If you let the strychnine settle and sip carefully, you might get a thirst-quenching drink. Is this what has become of knowledge? Do we now prefer may-be-true over I-don't-know? Wikipedia was an interesting phenomenon for the early 2000's when networking had finally reached a critical mass and the price of mass data storage was falling to within reach of the average person. Now it's time to grow up, to recognize that integrity of information is important, and that open discussion of topics among anonymous editors doesn't always result in a continually improved product. In some cases, it results in a poor product that can supplant something more useful and more accurate.

  4. I learn so much from Wikipedia! by callipygian-showsyst · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Just the other day, I saw that Alan Kay's parents were Mary Kay and Danny Kaye!

    ...and there's a list of the 43,322 people responsible for the John F. Kennedy assisination ..and that Lost in Space is generally regarded as being "better" than Star Trek

    The Wikipedia is a pile of crap, pretending to be something else. It has become a game where people with agendas (or senses of humor) try to see what they can slip under the radar.

    I prefer the "Uncyclopedia" http://uncyclopedia.org/ At least it doesn't pretend to be something it's not.

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