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

In the making for a while...

[ral315]

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...

That's not what I read

[Xcott Craver]

According to Wikipedia, the millionth article was written by Thomas Edison in 1691, after he invented the first commercially successful parachute. X

Re:Stubs?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

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.

1 million edits...

[SuperBanana]

the one-millionth article was created in the English-language Wikipedia.

"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."

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.

Re:Carefully chosen....

[Raul654]

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.

Re:Even IF

[jbolden]

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.