Slashdot Mirror
English Wikipedia Reaches 3 Million Articles
FunPika writes "It has taken more than eight years and the work of vast numbers of people around the world, but the English version of Wikipedia has finally amassed more than three million articles.
The site broke through the 3 million barrier early on Monday morning UK time, with the honors taken by a short article about Norwegian actor Beate Eriksen — a 48-year-old cast member of a popular local soap opera."
The site broke through the 3 million barrier, with the honors taken by a short article about Norwegian actor Beate Eriksen
And then the Wiki editors quickly deleted this article for being not important enough.
And for those of you keeping track, that's roughly 50,000 non-Manga/anime/Simpson's related articles.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Wow. Maybe I'm getting old, but I remember when "Wikipedia" was James Wales's Geocities page where he exhaustively listed his favorite episodes of The Simpsons. Then he wanted his friends to be able to contribute their knowledge, but Geocities did not allow CGI scripts. So with a generous grant from the National Endowment for Democracy and the Carnegie institute for International Peace, he started "Wikki-Web," a fan-site for FOX network cartoons. The scope later broadened to topics as diverse as astrophysics and science dogs, and the name changed to "WIKIPEDIA." The rest, as they say, was history...
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So... this "3 million barrier" the summary mentions... I think I'm going to have to ask for a citation please.
Sounds like an arbitrary number to me...
Pity that two million of them are hopelessly biased toward whatever agenda has the most dweebs willing to re-write the articles 40 times a day.
Beate Eriksen (who?) will be more famous for being the 3,000,000th wiki article than for his acting skills.
Trolling is a art,
just when I was beginning to think the internet was getting boring and staid...
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
Poor Beate. He now knows he's only the 3 millionth thing people got around to caring about.
Beate baby - gotta work on your rep! Get a new agent. Have a scandal with an underage girl. No wait, this is Norway, make it a boy. You'll never make it into the post-apocalyptic ark that Norway is building in the Fjords at this rate!
I am personally waiting for it to reach 3294199.
(For those of you mathematically illiterate that number is pi*(2^20).)
Wake me up when we get there.
Let me quickly defend the Wikipedia here: Yes, the deletionists are annoying. However, there is a reason why "non-notable" articles are deleted: To minimize the number of articles that have to be watched to make sure spammers and vandals don't damage the articles.
Every time someone makes an article, that's one more article admins have to baby-sit. Even with thousands of people looking for spam and vandalism, there's a lot of subtle vandalism that gets in under the radar.
If every single high school or every single garage band or every single webcomic had a Wikipedia article, it would strain the admins ever more.
It's amazing that admins are able to keep the vandalism under control as much as they have been able to. Wikipedia is an Alexa top 10 site (I can't say the same for Slashdot, not by a long margin), and its purpose is to provide useful information for readers. Which is does very well. Yes, the Wiki is imperfect, and, yes, it has admins who have power trips, but the system works.
in other news, the english Wikipedia is expected to reach 2.5 million articles by friday, when all the deletionists are back from their holidays and are back on track again.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Congratulations to Wikipedia for celebrating this historic ***ERIC IS A FAG*** milestone, only 750 years in the making!
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Anybody else find it ironic that the site that has descriptions of objects like the lightsaber and "events" like Battle of the Line deletes articles about actual people and/or places because they aren't noteworthy?
Not especially. Wikipedia defines notability as "several different reliable sources have written about it", irrespective of whether the subject exists in the real world or only in fiction. The best-known melee weapon from the Star Wars films certainly qualifies.
This was called days ago.
http://slashdot.org/submission/1056247/English-Wikipedia-Approaching-3-Million-Articles
I guess it's too late to stop people from claiming that a barrier has been broken whenever some round number has been exceeded. The sound barrier was a real barrier, in that aerodynamics works very differently above and below the speed of sound, meaning that engineering a plane to fly stably above the speed of sound was a nontrivial undertaking. But it was no harder to write article number 3 million than article number 2,999,999. There was no barrier.
And twelve of them are factually correct ... perhaps
I've mentioned the sad case of Pidgey before, but considering this milestone, I think it's worth bringing it up again.
Pidgey is a Pokemon. In February 2007, Pidgey had his own page at Wikipedia. You could go there and see a small template(since deleted) explaining to you what Pidgey is and various other pieces of information about him. It was objectively a useful resource.
Pidgey no longer has a page. Pidgey has a paragraph. A tragically short and dry affair devoid of even the most basic image. One can learn very little about Pidgey from reading it. And why is this? Why must Pidgey be so excised from the the site? Because he is a Pokemon? Does being a cartoon character or a children's toy or anything else automatically make something unworthy of a few kilobytes of page space on the the supposed repository of all the world's knowledge. The sad fact is that answer to that question is a resounding YES.
"A page for every Pokemon" was once used as a derogatory remark about Wikipedia. Evidently, enough faceless wikicrats took exception to this and decided to purge all mention of Pidgey and all the rest of the Pokemon, beyond the barest minimum of exposure, to make sure Wikipedia was regarded as a "professional" and "encyclopedic" resource. Pidgey and the Pokemon, and countless others have been subjected to the digital equivalent of a book burning by people who held an opinion that certain information was not "worthy" of archival. This from the same crowd of people who think that the Cloud Gate, Wood Badges, Ima Hogg and Books on the psychology of Est are all topics worthy enough to be Featured Articles. Compared to such worthies, perhaps Pidgey, merely part of a 5 billion dollar franchise, does fall a little short. But as short as all that?
Technology is improving, access to knowledge and the cost of providing it are plummeting; Yet Wikipedia's growth is slowing. Pidgey is merely a symptom of the underlying decay present in the online encyclopedia. His purge was less about practicalities than it was about running Wikipedia in a way at odds with it ostensibly free, open and inclusive nature. His fate was the result of all information on Wikipedia that falls under the baleful eyes of those editors with opinions and the power to exercise them.
Pidgey's was not the first page to be purged from Wikipedia, nor the most important. But it will not be the last, or the smallest.
May the Maths Be with you!
...when it's Geekipedia. You're insane if you consult Wikipedia for any real-world event -- especially a one that happened in recent memory or is still unfolding -- but there's no better one-stop for an overview of the 4th season of Buffy or Lightsaber faux-physics. So... count your blessings. Hopefully the site will morph from an omnipedia of spurious repute to a Pop Culture bible that's the final word on the stuff it does well.
True, but I would argue that Ebonics is a more valid and complete language/dialect, being that it arose naturally.
For those who haven't studied linguistics, yes, every dialect has its own grammatical rules. Those who speak a dialect learn the rules by example rather than from books - the same way you know (if you're a native English speaker) that "the big red ball" is correct and "the red big ball" is incorrect. Nobody taught you that. Most of the rules of language, in fact, are embedded in your brain before you ever go to school - how else could you talk?
In the same way, dialects like Ebonics have rules that insiders know without learning them from a book. Those people can understand each other, so it's perfectly valid language. And just like say, Spanish evolved from "backwoods" Latin, Ebonics could conceivably become an independent language.
Yes, anybody who wants to succeed in business needs to be able to speak and write "standard" English (the one used in Universities and businesses) to make a good impression and communicate with people of varying races and backgrounds. But there's nothing wrong with using Ebonics, or any other "uneducated" dialect, among friends.
But this already happens - a lot of the time, although such articles are seemingly "deleted" from Wikipedia, it's because they've been "transwikied" to a more dedicated Wiki for that subject.
If this was done as a standard rule, you'd still have arguments over where each article should go. And do you really mean that everything on something fictional should go on the separate site - even the main article for Star Trek, or a work of Shakespeare? What about other expressions of culture such as articles for well known albums or songs? Or if you mean the less notable ones, then you'll just have the arguments over that...
I have had exactly the same experience - any idiot can find "references" to any idiotic thing they want, whereas established experts in the same field are effectively locked out by not being able to quote themselves.
you should sign yourself up as one of the bots, then your edits automagically gain reputability.
A bot that is reputable, makes a joke of the NPOV policy and the notability policy.
The bots page can't even auto-update itself with the number of wikipedia articles :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots
As of posting, the page reads:
"Bots are automated or semi-automated tools that carry out repetitive and mundane tasks in order to maintain the 2,981,743 articles contained in the English Wikipedia."
lol - you suck donkey balls, wikiwankers !
About 18,000 odd beers short of a sixpack ....
Although Wiki is a great help, it seems they discriminate on who they allow to submit or edit.
pochp
Wikipedia isn't a *.* copy of the internet. What you want is the internet, its already out there, go nuts.
In the newfangled Internet verncacular... "this".
Wikipedia isn't- and isn't meant to be, by its own rules- a primary source of information. It follows therefore that its only real purpose must be to collate, distill and make existing information more useful and reliable.
If we simply wanted a mass of information over everything else, well... we already have the Internet and search engines. And most of the non-OR content (i.e. stuff that follows the rules) on WP is already available on the Internet.
(Personally, I'm neither a deletionist nor an inclusionist; the fact I'm not a 100% inclusionist can be indicated by the fact that I *don't* think everyone's pet cat warrants a page. In fact, unless you agree that some crud I found under my fingernail this morning (*) warrants a writeup if it's somehow verifiable, then you do- to however small an extent- have deletionist tendencies, the only question then being where one draws the line.)
(*) Not a small green lump of putty, which *is* notable for reasons you'll either know or not :-)
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Back in July someone put up a page that mentions me so now, just when I'm beginning to feel special you go and tell me I'm just one of 3 million pages. It kinda popped my balloon. So much for my millisecond of fame.