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."

Comments

Does size matter?

[bcrowell]

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.

Re:Does size matter?

[Khalid]

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.

Re:Does size matter?

[sbaker]

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.