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."

Comments

Likely a lot more than 2 million

[suso]

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.

Re:Likely a lot more than 2 million

[KiloByte]

That depends on the encoding - either 72 characters in ASCII or UTF-8 or 36 characters if they go for the more multi-lingual friendly UTF-16. UTF-16 more multi-lingual friendly than UTF-8? Er... it has many disadvantages and not a single benefit over UTF-8.

For example, UTF-16 needs a lot of porting effort, while UTF-8 magically works in all 8-bit-clean programs that don't need to count codepoints or tell character properties (and hey, bytes happen to _be_ 8-bit wide so unless you do something strange, you are 8-bit-clean). Most English-speaking developers won't put this effort, so here goes your multi-lingual friendliness.

Or another, more insidious flaw of UTF-16: it gives people a false feeling that they can store an entire character in a single array position. This works... as long as you don't meet any character over U+FFFF (rare Han[1], etc) or characters which need to be written using a base char + combining characters (Indic scripts, etc). UTF-8 makes no such promises, and thus doesn't lead to such non-obvious bugs.

UTF-16 is an abomination that needs to go. Unfortunately, it's entrenched in Windows API: you need to use BlueScreenW() instead of BlueScreenA() everywhere, and this is something people who don't need internationalization don't want to do. Even as of Vista, Microsoft still doesn't allow simply setting the system's code page to UTF-8, something which the whole Unix world[2] did years ago.

[1]. And according to People's Murderous Commiepublic of China's laws, you need to support these (as GB18030) in any product sold in mainland China. Of course, they don't give a damn about that law unless they want to demand a favour from a company so they have a yet another stick of non-compliance).

[2]. All non-toy distros do this by default, and if not for few whiners, non-UTF8 locales would probably be dropped by now.

That was quick

[micpp]

And people have already tried to delete the article for not being notable.

Re:That was quick

[WWWWolf]

Can you be notable for being not-notable? Or famous simply for being famous? ... Before you answer "no" think of celebrities like Paris Hilton...

Basically, the situation is this: Notability has its thresholds - either you are notable or not (though where exactly to draw the line is, at times, difficult - but we have pretty clear picture by now). Articles about people, bands, groups, companies, websites, etc. have to have assertions of notability (i.e. "they're really big in Pakistan and have released three albums", or whatever). Notability has to be backed up by reliable sources.

This leads to the situation that 1) people who are famous for failing at something can be considered notable enough for articles of their own (provided someone noticed and documented that in a reliable source), and 2) worthless celebrities are, alas, notable enough for articles because they probably have had verifiable media appearances.

(Think of it this way: if I had not heard about Paris Hilton before, I'd go to the article, come to the conclusion that she's a worthless celebrity, and be done with it. If there was no articles about her, I'd probably ask "hey, this... thing is on TV all the time, what the heck has she done to get there, anyway, and why isn't there an article about her?" =)

Is it so important?

[El Lobo]

And why, oh why, is it always so important to know exactly which articles was Nr X, which poster was the first one, which was the first child born in the new millenium, how many times did Al pacino say "fuck" on Scarface and so on?...

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?).

Re:Is it so important?

[daeg]

Just so you know, you're the 8th person bitching about this, and the 5th since the turn of the hour's 22nd minute, with a very high probability that future posters will bitch about it too, and will bitch about it at the 2.5 million mark, too, and the 5 million.

What I love about Wikipedia....

[Demerara]

...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....

Spanglish Wiki?

[Mr. Underbridge]

"...a milestone for the English-language Wikipedia:" ..."Initial reports stated that the two millionth article written was El Hormiguero, which covers a Spanish TV comedy show."

Wow, that's ironical.

Re:Just one question

[Da Fokka]

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.

Re:Just one question

[Notquitecajun]

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.

Re:It would be interesting to know

[jollyreaper]

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. I would agree that there's no place for that sort of thing in a paper encyclopedia, there's just not enough room. If you want geek stuff, you have to buy those books separately. But wiki has no practical limitation, it can grow to be however big it needs to. So long as the information is well-written, what does it matter? The important matter is indexing the information. Without a good index, I could certainly see your point, the practical information could be lost amongst the impractical. But wiki has a good manual index and google automatically indexes the shit out of the site. So what's the rub?

Wikipedia thrives on controversial subjects

[tucuxi]

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.

Re:How many articles do other encyclopedias have?

[LiquidCoooled]

Actually, wikipedia can answer that (though I don't know how accurate it is):

The size of the Britannica has remained roughly constant over the past 70 years, with about 40 million words on half a million topics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Bri tannica

Re:It would be interesting to know

[JesseMcDonald]

It seems to me (and apparently the GP as well) that you're criticizing Wikipedia for not having the same limitations as a paper encylopedia. Who cares what proportion of the articles fall into some niche category, as long as one can still easily find all the information one is looking for? The simple fact that a physical encyclopedia has limited storage space and thus cannot contain in-depth articles on every little special-interest detail does not appear to me to somehow constitute an advantage for physical encyclopedias.

Or were you perhaps simply protesting the direct comparison of article counts between Wikipedia and Britannica? That I could understand, since the comparison could hardly be fair. Their requirements are simply too different for any direct quantitative comparison to be meaningful.

Re:Just one question

[h2g2bob]

Clicking the cite this page link on any page will tell you:

IMPORTANT NOTE: Most educators and professionals do not consider it appropriate to use tertiary sources such as encyclopedias as a sole source for any information -- citing an encyclopedia as an important reference in footnotes or bibliographies may result in censure or a failing grade. Wikipedia articles should be used for background information, as a reference for correct terminology and search terms, and as a starting point for further research.

As with any community-built reference, there is a possibility for error in Wikipedia's content -- please check your facts against multiple sources and read our disclaimers for more information.

Yeah, but hasn't Wikipedia jumped the shark?

[Medievalist]

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?

Re:Just one question

[jandrese]

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.

Re:Just one question

[carpe_noctem]

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.

Re:Yeah, but hasn't Wikipedia jumped the shark?

[Taxman415a]

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.