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."

Comments

And then it was proptly deleted

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:And then it was proptly deleted

[FlyingSquidStudios]

Fun from the talk page. A Wiki language geek "honored" the article by translating it into Anglo-Saxon for the Anglo-Saxon language version of Wikipedia. Because if there's one language that Wikipedia needs to be translated in, it's one that no one actually speaks anymore. http://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beate_Eriksen

Re:And then it was proptly deleted

[NeoSkink]

Which brings up the next obvious question: Will the next milestone be 4 million articles, or 2 million articles!

Re:And then it was proptly deleted

[A. B3ttik]

What's even funnier is comparing the relative lengths of related articles:

For instance:

Pokemon compared to Animal
Wizard compared to Scientist
Afghan Civil War compared to Marvel Civil War
Emperor Palpatine compared to Emperor Charles IV
Klingon Language compared to Mandarin Chinese

Re:And then it was proptly deleted

[I.M.O.G.]

A culture that shuns subject matter experts and at the same time pretends to inform me about said subjects may be entertaining, but never trustworthy.

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.

Re:And then it was proptly deleted

[DaleGlass]

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.

And that's...

[MyLongNickName]

And for those of you keeping track, that's roughly 50,000 non-Manga/anime/Simpson's related articles.

Crazy but true.

[grub]

Beate Eriksen (who?) will be more famous for being the 3,000,000th wiki article than for his acting skills.

Re:It's come a long way

[Trepidity]

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.

A Pause for Pidgey.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

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.