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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."
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
Beate Eriksen (who?) will be more famous for being the 3,000,000th wiki article than for his acting skills.
Trolling is a art,
And no, you can't go to Wikipedia and count, because that would be "original research." Wait for someone to tweet about it - THERE's your proof.
;)
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
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.
[citation needed]
Seriously, mods, please check to see if stuff like this is real by checking out sources before modding posts up.
If that is the reason, than it sounds like what is needed is a method, perhaps some flavor of tagging, for indicating salience/likely level of admin attention. Have it sort of like those "no lifeguards on duty" signs. Sure, there aren't enough lifeguards to cover all possible swimming locations; but you don't coat all the beaches you can't watch with razor wire, you just let people know that nobody is even going to notice if they drown there.
On wikipedia, the same basic thing would apply. If you wander into a low interest/low traffic area, you'd have a little notice at the top of the page, telling you that this is a minimally trafficked article, and anybody could have scrawled anything on it, and nobody would notice.
With storage costs(particularly for minimally formatted text) so damn low, you don't save much by deleting(and you potentially lose something by doing so) which makes some means of organization that allows a compromise much more attractive.
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
Lest anyone be confused:
1. WikiWikiWeb was founded by Ward Cunningham, not Jimmy Wales; and focused on cataloguing software patterns, not Simpsons episodes.
2. The direct precursor to Wikipedia was MeatballWiki, a wiki based on a new wiki engine, UseModWiki (which Wikipedia would adopt for its initial period), and focused on online culture.
3. Wikipedia was formed as a side project of Nupedia, an attempt to produce an open-content encyclopedia along more traditional lines (get volunteer writers, editors, a review process, have professors submit draft manuscripts, attach author names---usually a single author---to articles, etc.). The idea was that Wikipedia could be used as work space where people collected and organized the information, making it easier to write Nupedia articles. It never really cracked up that way, as the workspace itself quickly became a lot better encyclopedia than Nupedia ever was.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
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.
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!
True, but I would argue that Ebonics is a more valid and complete language/dialect, being that it arose naturally.
I guess it's nonsense to call anything spoken by real people invalid or incomplete, but Tolkien was just crazy about languages. He spoke many, knew more and was highly interested in their structure. He just as much created the books around the language as the other way around, at least Sindarin for the elves. What he created is probably as natural as any real language, perhaps even more since it's shaped around one man's linguistic vision and not centuries of collected oddities that crop up.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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?
I suggest you go to Columbus, Ga and try to order something more complicated than "number 7 with Coke" from the drive-through.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.