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English Wikipedia Gets Two Millionth Article
reybrujo writes to inform us of a milestone for the English-language Wikipedia: the posting of its two millionth article. At the time of this posting there is uncertainty over which article achieved the milestone. "Initial reports stated that the two millionth article written was El Hormiguero, which covers a Spanish TV comedy show. Later review of this information found that this article was most likely not two million, and instead a revised list of articles created around two million has been generated, and is believed to be correct to within 3 articles. The Wikimedia foundation, which operates the site, is expected to make an announcement with a final decision, which may require review of the official servers' logs."
Mediawiki doesn't count all articles in its article count. And I'm not talking about talk or image pages either. I think it has a threshold of like 72 bytes before it counts an article as an article. So they are most likely way over 2 million. For instance, Bloomingpedia actually has 2,148 articles right now but the Mediawiki count on the front page only shows 2,106. So 42 of the articles are smaller than the threshold.
However, if they (or anyone else) need a plugin for Mediawiki that will list the pages in order so that you can count them and determine which article was the Nth article, I wrote a plugin called Page Create Order that will put a special page called "List Pages By Creation Date" in your wiki. We developed it for Bloomingpedia originally. Its simple, but it does the job. It could be easily modified to only count articles that are of a certain size as well, the main purpose of this plugin is to see the order in which pages where created.
And people have already tried to delete the article for not being notable.
Can't they just check Wikipedia?
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Which was the millionth article then? Not that it really matters, just being curious, cause I'm like, bored..
You just got troll'd!
Do we have so few problems that we have the need to statistically know EVERYTHING? Does that matter (other than to inflate the vanity of a few?).
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
...is their commitment to stating the obvious. At length...
The 2,000,000 article is actually the last article to be part of the first 2,000,000 articles and the 2,000,001 is the first of the third million.
I'm glad they cleared that up - I wondered whether the 2,000,000 article might be actually the one millionth or perhaps the 4 millionth....
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
It could have been image macros of "JUST AS PLANNED" with the caption text "2M GET" over and over again.
Who said you can't use Wiki on a college paper -- at any college? How would you know something that would require input from people from such a broad swath of colleges? What's that you say? You consulted a wiki...
It would be interesting to know how many "real" articles there are. That is, if you took out the individual articles for all the fictional sci-fi characters that wikipedia seems to excel at, all the articles for individual episodes of Star Trek and Dr Who, basically all the meaningless cruft that nerds deem important - then, count how many articles there are. Far, FAR less than 2 million, I would expect.
Let me fix that for you:
You can't even quote an encyclopedia on a college paper, so why should anyone be using one?
So this makes encyclopedias useless? If you say so.
SlimVirgin gets banned along with her enablers. Grow some balls Jimbo.
Wow, that's ironical.
You can't quote a microwave in a college paper either, but it's certainly useful.
But seriously, Not every source has to be academical to be of use. For many subjects, wikipedia is an excellent starting point. You might want to take lemmata on controversial subjects like Palestine and the Evolution with a grain of salt, but for many a subject the articles on wikipedia are of excellent quality.
You have two exclusive statements...one which makes sense, the other which doesn't.
Who cares? I mean honestly, who does?
In the long run, this is quite a minor historical marker. We're going to see article 5 million and MAYBE that will matter a little more. Maybe.
You can't even quote Wikipedia on a college paper, so why should anyone be using it
Correct - it's rather dumb to use it on a college paper (like using a regular paper encyclopedia); however, Wikipedia is the fastest starting point and is a good medium on not only specific information on subjects and sources, but also on the opinions of people with education, expertise, and bias on their subjects. If you dig into some controversial topics' histories, there is actually some VERY good information to wade through and find sources on. The end result is not perfect, the system IS flawed, but the information that you can glean from digging and researching STARTING at Wikipedia is quite useful.
Plus, the specialized wikis that are popping up that are using wiki-style management for their small wikis (where REAL experts can actually post) may be the bigger genius behind wikipedia).
If your complaint about wikipedia is that the final articles are flawed, you're right...but look at the process behind some of those articles and the histories. Dig into that, and you find what you need.
You might want to take lemmata on controversial subjects like Palestine and the Evolution with a grain of salt,
Actually, giving it a quick glance, I don't see any reason for there to be significant problems with the evolution article? Thankfully, NPOV doesn't mean "let the Creationists get equal say", and I suspect attempts to work in a pro-ID viewpoint would get reverted.
A starting point, but if the article is good, it will ist a good set of sources, and there's no reason for you to not take your information directly from those.
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Why is there always confusion over this issue? The real milestone is when it reaches 2M articles in binary (base 2)!
That would be 2,097,152 decimal, for those too lazy to break out their calculators, or 2*(2^20) according to Wikipedia.
Because they draw people to try to reflect their points of view; and when you read the article (say, abortion or evolution or software patents) you can gain a quick overview on almost any significant point of view on the subject, and how they relate to each other. Yes, individual viewpoints may not be perfectly reflected. But you *do* gain an incredibly broad view, which no traditional encyclopedia can deliver.
Wikipedia is much more likely to be useful on a controversial subject where people feel inclined to participate (and correct or refactor partisan views) than in non-controversial subjects that doesn't scratch anybody's itches. You need to cross a certain threshold in order to contribute to an article. Articles that aren't important to you you simply will not edit. Articles that are edited by many may not gain "quality", but will become very broad, and better starting points for further research than those that are only edited by a few not-that-motivated users.
Someone wake me up when they do something truly monumental like 10 million articles or some such. Although it only took 7 months to get from the one millionth to the two millionth so I suppose 10 million won't be that long in coming.
Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted.
Two million does sound impressive. Congratulations, Wikipedia. But how does this compare to other encyclopedias? Does anyone have numbers for Britannica or World Book?
If you set out to be mediocre, and you turn out to be very good at it, are you really mediocre?
But concerning your example, yes, she is.
If X is the new Y, and Y is "X is the new Y", solve for X.
Of course, the results will be edited to show that the 2,000,000th article is on Steven Colber's continuing humanitarian work to deal with the perpetual threat of BEARS!
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Nominated for deletion, amusingly enough.
It was "speedy kept", but amusing that a stratified sample shows not only that wikipedia is filling these days with trivia, but also bureaucracy.
(Yes, I have a bee in my bonnet about wikipedia even though I love it -- see my sig.)
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The editors of wikipedia determine this.
The current consensus says it is right to create a page about a fiction person in a sf serie, but a page about a real person needs a lot more noticeably to be not deleted on the fast track list.
If you think it is right to place a external link. Think again. wikithink will most likely remove it.
You might want to take lemmata on controversial subjects like Palestine and the Evolution with a grain of salt,
</quote>
Or Afrocentrism, or Scientology, or Han Chauvinism, or Jihad, Islamophobia, or any article relating to politics, religion, history, personalities, art, or any humanities subject. Most of those articles were taken over by partisan propaganda groups and their admin backers a long time ago. Then again, after a few months, another partisan group takes over and changes the article to their propaganda, and the wars continue... Basically the group that can bully others out efficiently wins in these cases.
Articles relating to science and technology (and some trivia if you're into that sort of thing) are generally okay and contain good references and stuff. The rest is cruft.
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
You shouldn't use *any* encyclopedia on a paper for college. You can use one to get a general overview of a subject, but stick to other sources for actual citations and fact-checking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Newpages
This will take you to the list of the most recently created articles. If you find that you have trouble keeping up with other editors who are reviewing the same articles, you might find this link useful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Newpages&limit=250&offset=250&namespace=0
Which will take you to the same list, but starting from the 250th most recent article.
Typically, it's most useful to
Anyone can do these things, and you can also just improve on any article by adding additional sources, or expanding on the article.
Looks like we're back to 1,999,999.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
I know a few retired rocket scientists. I'd love it if their unique knowledge didn't go to the grave with them. I'd rather be able to look up the definition of a "yardley" as a unit of pressure than a list of characters from Harry Potter. Unfortunately, wikipedia doesn't seem to be interested in anything that's "from personal knowledge or experience" these days.
If wikipedia is only going to allowed references to things already published elsewhere, and all written culture is inevitably moving online, how will wikipedia differentiate from Google? I mean, if there's no unique information in wikipedia, there's very little unique value in it. It's just a really labor-intensive presentation layer at that point, isn't it?
Except for that Han Chauvinism and some parts of the Islamophobia article (which was a complete mess), all of the articles you quoted look like a pretty neutral starting point for someone trying to learn about them for the first time. They cited lots of sources that a reader can go to for additional research and for the most part kept a neutral point of view. I'd wager that you'd have a tough time finding a more balanced approach to some of these topics, Islamophobia and Afrocentrism especially, from any other source. The kind of people who coin terms like that are generally less interested in neutrality than Wikipedia is.
I read the internet for the articles.
Whoever said anything about quoting wikipedia itself? I would say it is of far greater use for research papers in that you can get a good overview of a subject, and then use the citations of said article to find other, lengthier papers more suitable for academia.
Wikipedia is a research tool, not the swiss army knife of research.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
wikisource is the MediaWiki project for original research.
Given the number, speed, and voracity of deletions on WP, this is probably more like the 3 millionth article, if you include all articles ever created.
By some time next month I expect the 2Mth article will be more like the 1,990Kth.
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I often use wiki as a source of resources when I am just getting started on a paper.
Many times the wiki page will have 20+ references listed at the bottom
Slashdot gets Two Millionth *Pointless* Article... ...more to come.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
Wikipedia...the walmart of online information.
~insert tech sarcasm here~
More details of this fiscal conflict of interest, that pads Wikia's pockets with each public relations brouhaha like this:
http://wikipediareview.com/blog/category/wikia/
Dude, where's my packet?
Wikipedia has never been interested in unique information. One of the first policies was the one against original research. That certainly doesn't mean there isn't a place for original research, (those are plentiful), nor does it mean Wikipedia isn't valuable. By collating and linking vast amounts of information, Wikipedia does something google can't. It creates the presentation of the information manually. Google can only index content that is already there through an algorithm. And for a long time if not forever, there will be information that is not online. Further, Wikipedia summarizes information like Google will likely never be able to. Even if a Wikipedia article is not all right, it can give you an idea of where to go look and what to look for, which is perhaps it's only truly valuable contribution until there is a way to formally peer review and freeze content so that the reader can see a version that is stabilized.
Er, virtually ALL mainstream scholars agree that Afrocentrism is hokum and nonsense, laced with ethnocentrism, nationalist pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology. It's dangerous nonsense to boot, as it has, hidden behind it, a racist, anti-Semitic and extremist Black Supremacist agenda a-la Al Sharpton and the Nation of "Islam" (by "Black" here I'm generally referring to African-Americans; this movement is virtually unheard of in Sub-Saharan Africa or among Black communities in Latin America). It is essentially the same as extremist racist and anti-Semitic White Supremacists and/or radical Islamists really when you think about it.
It is no more than the same kind of Scientific Racism that was concocted by Europeans against Africans and other perceived "non-whites" in the 19th century, just with the "good guys" and "bad guys" flipped over. The wikipedia article is a whitewash, with fringe literature (undue weight to which is supposed to be against WP:FRINGE policy and WP:RS partiasan and extremist sites policy on wikipedia:look it up) given same credence as mainstream literature. A simple glance at the talk page of the article will show fanatical Black Nationalist nutjobs "monitoring" the article and bullying away legitimate editors. This severely crimps the credibility of wikipedia to any scholarly pair of eyes.
Same with this mythical "Islamophobia" nonsense (which is different from the real problem of anti-Muslim prejudice, a completely different thing which has no article on wikipedia, strangely)."Islamophobia" is an Orwellian propaganda term created by Islamic extremists to stifle criticism of a religion and conflate it with bigotry against a particular group of people, and no non-partisan group will say otherwise (again, when bigotry against Muslims as an identifiable people is expressed, it is termed "anti-Muslim", not this nonsensical "Islamophobia"). Also, a simple glance at the history page of that article, together with the contribs of some of the editors will show a pretty well-coordinated militant wiki-activism by radical Islamists here.
Same with the Scientology article, with brainwashed scientologists creating real problems for wikipedia editors who want to portray the matter objectively, leading to a disastrous mess of an article.
There are more such examples, virtually any one of the tens of thousands of tagged articles (and several thousand or so untagged ones as well), all relating to politics, religion, history and other such subjects.
Of course, I know that this sort of sytemic bias towards partisan gangs can exist in many other sources. It is wikipedia's lack of accountability in these matters and it's facade of stability and fairness that I have a problem with. The actual content is normal, or, rather, no better or worse than graffitti in a public toilet.
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
...which is perhaps it's only truly valuable contribution until there is a way to formally peer review and freeze content so that the reader can see a version that is stabilized. I already have a Britannica. Why should a wiki be "stabilized"? Why is "formality" a virtue when wikipedia was created and gained value from non-conformance to traditional models?For example, there's a wikibooks page. You could try building an open textbook on rocket science. There's wikia where you could build a rocket science Wiki. These are mostly pop-culture or community based wikis, but you could make a serious special interest wiki, with original content, if you wish.
Then you could link to it from wikipedia pages, but you'd probably be asked to point out it contains unverified claims or some such.
On a bad day of revision wars and trolling, probably fifty or sixty "real" articles exist on Wacky-pedia. The rest are collections of somewhat-related material cobbled together at random, mixed with extremely detailed minute-by-minute breakdowns of obscure SciFi series episodes and entries about imaginary languages.
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...Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not an original publication. Huh? The other encyclopedias are original publications. The articles I wrote in the distant past for Wikipedia were all original text from my brain... mostly from personal knowledge, with no cites at all. Some of those articles are huge now, and certainly most are far better than they were when I originally wrote them, but I think none would be unchallenged today.Thank you for the wikibooks reference and wikia link, incidentally. Wasn't aware of those.
I hate to be a naysayer, but in what way is the 2000000th article a meaningful thing? We could also assign special value to the 1234567th article, or the 1111111th article, or the 1483725th article; it's just a number. How is the fact that it has several zero's in its base-ten representation at all significant?
The problem with controversial subjects is that unless it's _currently_ controversial, then only the people with vested interest in the subject are going to be editing it. This sometimes means that only one side is left.
My favorite example were the articles on freemasonry; there was an intense defensive tone and a lot of sweeping generalizations about how awesome the temples were and how every member was a paragon of moral humanity. While I hope it's been tuned down a bit since then, I'm always on the lookout for similar but subtler efects taht might trip me up.
Once no one in the public sphere cares about teaching creationism in schools(hopefully after the courts tell the creationists to screw off), I bet some history pages regarding the various associated trials and such get interesting.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it