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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."
Wikipedia's been doing a lot of good work for the last five years. It's nice to see the millionth article finally reached.
And to think that their original goal was 100,000 articles...
According to Wikipedia, the millionth article was written by Thomas Edison in 1691, after he invented the first commercially successful parachute. X
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.
"Deleted, article has no point."
"Reinstated. Of course it has a point" (flame war on 1_millionth_article:Talk omitted)
the fucking one-millionth article was created in the English-language Wikipedia.
"Removed vandalism"
the one-millionth article was created in Wikipedia.
"Corrected grammatical errors."
the one-millionth article was created in the English-language Wikipedia.
"It was right the first time, moron."
GOOD DAY I AM UZU UMBAMBE, I HAVE A SPECIAL OFFER FOR ALL WICIPEBA USERS. PLEASE SEND $500 TO ME AT...
"Motion to consider the possibility of blocking this user for possible violation of the Wikipedia Organization's policy on commercial advertising."
"Moved to subcommittee."
Please help metamoderate.
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.
Find free books.
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
While a million sounds impressive, here's a game which puts the "1 million articles" into a more realistic perspective. From the main page, click on "random article" 10 times and analyze the content.
D enmark (~1 paragraph)a du (list of name links)l _El_Hakh (1 small paragraph)r d_of_Education (1 paragraph)n g_history (decent sized article)_ Earl_of_Chichester (1 paragraph plus table)
For example, my results...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Franklin (~1 paragraph + links)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederika_Amalia_of_
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_The_Hague (1 paragraph + 1 sentence)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governors_of_Tamil_N
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ja%E2%80%99afar_Abdu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones (decent sized article)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matte_Babel (1+ paragraph)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Boa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derbyshire_lead_mini
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pelham%2C_2nd
Note: This is not a jab at Wikipedia, which I love reading/contributing to, but rather a demonstration of how much work is still needed to flesh out its body of articles. A million articles/stubs is a fun benchmark to celebrate, but let's not let that slow down our contributions any... we still need everyone's help than can!
In other news, our Govt representatives have successfully manipulated 10000 of
the pages on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is not trying to accomplish what Everything2 is. A lot of our problems stem from people thinking we are, in fact. The biggest difference is that original research is not allowed on Wikipedia but is encouraged and central to Everything2.
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
Well, at one point it actually was announced in the IRC channel that it would be the millionth non speedy deleted article. However, because Squidoo is a business it was decided that we should stick with the original one millionth, so as not to encourage people to use WP to promote their businesses. Which is fine with me.
I would note though that during the beta test all profits are being donated to charity, with over $4,000 raised so far. So if it was declared as the one millionth article it wouldn't have actually been a big deal, but I suppose perception is everything.
"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
Wikipedia Reaches 1,000,000 Articles.
j/k
EvilCON - Made Famous by
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.
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.
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.
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.
Best Buy can have you arrested
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 :)