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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 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.
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.
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.
Two million does sound impressive. Congratulations, Wikipedia. But how does this compare to other encyclopedias? Does anyone have numbers for Britannica or World Book?
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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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.
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
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.
Well original research just happens to be the name of the policy, but it covers all unpublished ideas and thought. And what I was saying is that Wikipedia intentionally avoids that type of thing as a necessary evil to maintain improvement in quality. Otherwise you either need a power structure that can say yeah or nay on content or you open floodgates to all the latest crackpot theories and information.You have to spend enough time on the project to reallize there isn't an in between. And again, it's not like there aren't lots of other sources for publishing that other valuable non published information. That's what post-docs are for right? :)
A manual presentation layer. I'm content-driven, personally, a slick presentation does not increase my perception of the value of information.
- Everybody says that, but studies show time and time again that the way information is presented has drastic effects on how much information gets accross and how it is percieved. Next you're going to tell us ads don't affect you.
Right, so it's an automatic (and thus more up-to-date) presentation layer, which carries quantifiable and repeatable bias by virtue of being algorithmic.
- What you're missing here is that google indexes links to information, it does not summarize the actual information as Wikipedia does. Even if the information you wanted was always in a google search, you still then have to collate it and judge sources, etc. Also quality information is not all or perhaps even mostly online right now. The work of summarizing the information is valuable, and if it is already done for you can get you further ahead on the task at hand.
Why should a wiki be "stabilized"? Why is "formality" a virtue when wikipedia was created and gained value from non-conformance to traditional models?
- Because the real goal is information quality. Demonstrable quality in a way useful to the reader/researcher. The non conforming, radically open current system has been shown to be successful in producing content, a smaller portion of it of reasonably high quality. But studies and observation of Wikipedia show that it has extremely high variation in quality. From articles replaced with "YO MAMA SO PHAT..." to widely reviewed articles citing and properly summarizing all the best written material on the subject. Formal peer review can lead to higher information quality and if that reviewed version is available as an option, default or not, can allow the best of both worlds. (like the Linux kernel and most other software) Then there can be both a radically open article that may be more up to date, balanced, etc, and a stable version that is at least guaranteed not to be vandalized. The amount of stabalization could be as little as that or as much as the formally reviewed case, or both. Thus the best of both worlds, content is produced, and high quality content is available, and the review processes can be demonstrated.
No, the "no original research" rule was instituted to deal with physics crackpots. This is documented on wikipedia itself if you actually delve into the pages about the rule.
There is no good way for wikipedia to differentiate between the personal experiences or knowledge of a 73-year-old rocket scientist wunderkind, a crackpot writing stuff in his garage, or a published scientist dabbling poorly outside his actual area of expertise. So wikipedia just disallows that sort of thing entirely, and draws instead on the difficulty in those people publishing their work in peer-reviewed journals or mainstream publications by setting threshholds in that direction.
And it's not wikipedia's fault if the knowledge of a 73-year-old-Jim-Yardley knower isn't preserved. Anecodes and anything else from him can be written down on any web page and preserved for posterity that way. (And if they get media attention because they're not crackpottery, they may make it into wikipedia someday.)
The goal of preserving absolutely everything known by every human, but only the good stuff, is unsatisifiable, and wikipedia aims on the extremely conservative side of the problem. It may not seem like that with all the pop culture crap to be found there, but wikipedia isn't a single coherent entity, it's a teeming mass of random people following the rules to varying degrees of accuracy and with no consistency at all. Somehow people care more about following the rules when it comes to rocket science than when it comes to character summaries of last year's big TV show. And isn't that awesome?