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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."
Which brings up the next obvious question: Will the next milestone be 4 million articles, or 2 million articles!
And then the Wiki editors quickly deleted this article for being not important enough.
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?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Spot on.
When you have some time to kill, just keep clicking the "Random Article" link. By gum lad, there's some shite on that there Wikipedia.
I edited once, my own village's page FFS, some of the dross on there was laughable, and obviously cribbed from some online tourist agency. After I corrected some blatant rubbish, some uber-tosser later reverted the edits, because apparently it was not a "NPOV".
What's that all about?
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
Why would the admins have to watch these pages? Does it even matter if there is vandalism or spam on a page about some small garage band or anime episode X? The people (if any) who are interested in those pages are the ones who will notice or care if there is spamdalism on those pages, and I'm sure many of them would be happy to fix it. The reason wikipedia is successful I believe has a lot more to do with the decentralization of administration than the diligent efforts of the deletionist admins.
Just as an example, let's say I go to a page about important topic A (let's say Obama's page) this causes me to follow links to several other relevant topics (Health care, economy, etc). Where in this scenario will I be affected by the spam on the page of Joe the garage band member?
Another scenario, I know Joe the garage band member and I look up his band on wikipedia. Oops, it has an add for penis enlargement. Since I know Joe I check the history and revert the changes to see the page. Compare this with going to Joe's bands page and finding nothing. I spend 20 minutes writing something up. The next day it is deleted. Now the next person who goes to the page after seeing Joe's band at a local bar also finds no information on wikipedia.
My main point is that an article with history and spam is better than no article at all. It doesn't matter if the admin's can't monitor all the pages about every trivial topic, no one expects them to. I think a non-deletionist wiki could beat wikipedia in the long run. The problem is that wikipedia just has so much momentum that it would be very tough for a new site to catch up.
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.
This implies wikipedia shuns subject matter experts. This is a popularly circulated stance which has no grounding in fact. They happily accept material from subject matter experts, they just require that the subject matter experts reference their published material which shows them as subject matter experts.
If someone speaks as an authority on a topic in wikipedia, I should be able to refer to the sources they cite in order to determine how much weight I place in the statements I read. I do not want to go to Wikipedia and read un-cited "expert testimony" from the internet. It is both reasonable and wise to expect that any subject matter expert should be able to provide reference of published work.
Overclockers
I disagree.
I want a wikipedia with absolutely everything in existence in it. Pokemon, Star Trek, every single general that participated in WWII, and a page for every cat whose owner wants to make one thrown in for good measure.
I never had a problem with there being too much stuff in wikipedia, I keep bumping into that there's too little, because some obscure trivia that I actually find helpful got removed.
IMO, at this rate wikipedia will end up dying, because they need donations, and every time I find something I liked gone I decide not to give them anything. I'm probably not the only one who thinks that way.