Wikipedia Reaches 100,000th Article

An anonymous reader writes "'Wikipedia, a community-built multilingual encyclopedia, is announcing that the English edition of the project has reached a milestone of 100,000 articles in development. In addition, the project itself has celebrated its two-year anniversary on January 15. But not just the English version has grown impressively: More than 37,000 articles are now being worked on in the non-English editions of Wikipedia.' Read the press release for more information or visit the website to enlighten yourself! It's great to see that this interactive project works; at least I don't have to boot into Windows to use Encarta anymore!"

A Great Collaborative Success Story

For any doubters you know that say collaboration can't generate something awesome, Wikipedia is a gigantic, glowing, neon proof that it can, indeed.

I've spent hours browsing topics on that site, and remain constantly amazed at the depth and breadth of knowledge on it.

For amusement, look up "slashdot [wikipedia.org]" on it. You will find more history and amusement than you remembered ever living through yourself.

It even covers the troll era, with entries on Natalie Portman, grits, whatnot (I dare not type too many examples lest I be lameness filtered).

Re:A Great Collaborative Success Story

Sorry for a second post, but another awesome wiki with a more technical bent is at c2 dot com [c2.com] (I linked you to starting points). Another place where I've spent hours and hours and... aaah. Collaboration rocks.

Am I the only one who is just hearing about this?

One would think that educational institutions would snatch something like this up in a heartbeat (same goes for the GPL version of education documents and reference material). Or is it that the maturity of the project isnt near what standard university requirements yet is the hold up?

Re:Am I the only one who is just hearing about thi

The big problem with this is it's best feature. Accuarcy. I was just browsing the site for something that I know in a reasoable amount of depth, and came across the entry for heart attack [wikipedia.org].

It states things like "Infarct refers to the artery being plugged or clogged up", where it actually is the death of tissue cause by a lack of oxygen. Things like that restrict it's use severly. I think I'll stick with peer reviewed articles for the moment. Universities tend to have libraries full of them.

Re:Am I the only one who is just hearing about thi

Try The 'Earth Edition' of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy [h2g2.com], it has a vast array of well-written articles.

The approach they take regarding peer review is interesting. There are two types of guide entry - edited and unedited. The edited guide is a collection of peer reviewed and edited articles, and likely to be more accurate and readable. The unedited guide entries are just anything, really. Could be total nonsense.

Anyway you should check it out, it is a good site and has a much better community aspect than Wikipedia or Everything2. In a sense it is more like Fark or Slashdot, only more friendly.

Re:Am I the only one who is just hearing about thi

I think I'll stick with peer reviewed articles for the moment.

You're a peer, you reviewed it, you found a problem. Why didn't you correct it?

Free is good

Thank God for free online reference.

If you've ever priced a full set of encyclopedia... whew... it's around 1200$

100,000 articles is great... The more the merrier.

Re:Free is good

I got my set of Britannicas for fourty cents per volume at a thrift store.

People are throwing out their classic paper encyclopedias.

And lets face it: for many topics, i.e. mathematics, history, etc. an old edition of Britannica is damned fine.

People go out and buy a CDROM version of Britannica and say 'why do we need these books.'

Ten years from now I will still have my Britannica set. Their CD-ROM won't access in whatever is the latest-greatest-shiney OS.

Sorry for being a curmudgeon, but it's things like traditional books in traditional libraries that are the basis of our cuture, that got us to the Moon.

Everything2

I'm a bigger fan of Everything2.com [everything2.com]. Currently at 479,928 writeups.

answer to my own question...

Does anyone know how they make sure all the submissions are accurate?

from their FAQs ...

Since anyone can edit any page, why would I give any credence to anything I read here?

We operate on the idea that many eyeballs make all errors shallow. Wikipedia is, self-consciously, an experiment in public collaboration quite unlike any print or online encyclopedia, and therefore it will be difficult to project the results, in terms of their credibility, until the project is farther along. But even then, you'll have to judge the results based on the articles themselves, rather than the credentials of their writers (which is itself often an unreliable way to determine credibility).

Some people think Wikipedia will give Britannica a run for its money. m:Making fun of Britannica.

Some people have plans for peer review or article certification systems to work on top of Wikipedia. We'll be sure to point them out if and when any get up and running.

Re:answer to my own question...

Agreed.

I am amazed at it and I believe this project may have potential. The problem with a moderation system is how do you prove the accuracy of all the subjects? With over 100,000 articles this could be a problem. What would be nice in addition to a moderation system would be a bio from the author or place where the article originated. If a dispute ever comes by someone with a stronger background could rewrite the article and put his/her bio on it. For example if I want to search for information on aspergers syndrome, I would want an article written by a researcher or phsycology professor and not some mom with a son with the condition.

If I write a paper with a reference to the page I can also include the bio to prove to my professor that the source is reliable or at the individual is. I do agree if I was a professor I would worry about the quality of the data being published and would only take papers with bibs to the site with a grain of salt. But the bio and the ban on anyone editing anything unless he/she can prove that they are more knowledgeable in the subject then the previous author might make this project work.

I do think there should be some paid volunteers and experts in particular subjects to check the authenticity of the work. Professors or researchers would be nice. A company sponser would also help since they can pay people to do this. I would think Yahoo for example would love to fund this so they can compete with AOL and Microsoft. They already have the most popular portal on the web.

I hate the idea of anyone just editing the content. Bad bad bad! Beyond bad. This could kill it.

Quality?

Is the quality as high as when they started? I went there when they were first mentioned on slashdot. The quality control process they described was very impressive but also daunting for anyone wanting to contribute. If they've reached the 100k article threshold with the same quality control it is world-class resource.

Jason
ProfQuotes [profquotes.com]

comparison

How does 100,000 articles compare to 'old style' encyclopedias (e.g. Brittanica, World Book, etc)?

And when can I buy a nicely bound hard-copy for the cost of printing (plus a buck for the FSF)?

Re:comparison

You'll find some vague comparisons to paper encyclopedias at Wikipedia:Size comparisons [wikipedia.org]. It's hard to compare directly, though; Wikipedia tends to divide up large subjects into a number of separate entries, and includes quite a few entries on subjects that aren't likely to be in traditional encyclopedias (imported US Census data on 30,000 communities, including one-horse towns in the midwest somewhere of little historical importance; culturally significant films, games, internet culture phenomena, yadda yadda).

If you're interested in publishing a dead-tree edition, we'd love to hear from you [wikipedia.org]. ;)

Pretty good breadth

I've used wikipedia on several occasions and have even contributed a few articles relating to my university, city, and province. What an excellent project!

The breadth is pretty good. I've looked up things from world history to technical (modern day). I'd have to say the technical entries are stronger than the historical ones.

I worry a bit about historical inaccuracies, political leanings, bias etc. but then again all that stuff exists in any other published work out there. Maybe this thing we create together, with peer review and editing is no worse (bias-wise) than a collection of documents from a publisher?

Correctness

And who does check the articles? They could contain false information, right?

I think this is a great project, but I'm still using some other references to check the information , provided by sites like this.

Re:Correctness

You should always consult multiple sources of information if you're concerned about bias and correctness. That goes for your Brittanica or Microsoft encyclopedia, too.

The thing that makes Wikipedia a little different is that, once you've consulted other sources and come to your own balanced conclusions, you can edit the article to bring it more in line with accuracy and the project's Neutral Point of View [wikipedia.org] goal/policy.

A malicious or unthinking person could skew it away, but so can you put it back on track.

In addition, as the 'pedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, you're welcome to republish a culled version that includes only 'known good' revisions of articles. There has been some talk of a semi-official project along these lines run by Wikipedia's former editor, Larry Sanger, but it hasn't been put into place yet.

Remember, Wikipedia is still very much under construction; it's only two years old and just getting the hang of walking around. There's no need to rush into driving yet. ;)

Wiki for documentation

I recently did some consulting for a large, public organization, and suggested they do their in-house documentation Wiki style. This organization has a huge body of mostly textual documentation for technical equipment - and letting everybody update it seemed to me to be a great idea. You need a couple of organizational safeguards, of course, such as version tracking and rewards for people who do a lot of editing and write well. And you definitely need to assign some people of moderator quality to hammer out a culture of neutral point of view, attention to detail and frequent cross-checking of each others material.

But the sheer simplicity of this solution, especially if you are starting from available documentation, should, as I have long advocated, make it useful for a lot more than a GPL Encyclopedia.

from the Wikipedia page on "Slashdotting"

Wikipedia has been "slashdotted", July 26, 2001. [wikipedia.org]

Oops, looks like that one will have to get updated.

Duplication of effort

25 posts, and already 4 alternative online encyclopedias have been mentioned. Isn't this a gigantic waste of effort?

Re:Duplication of effort

H2G2 and everything2 are copyright-encumbered, making it impossible to create derivative works (ie, republishing a culled 'good parts' version, hardcover or CD-ROM editions, or continuing the whole project if the current sponsor drops it) without explicitly licensing content from the BBC or the individual authors.

Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License [wikipedia.org], making it proof against the current network provider going out of business or losing interest, and opening its content up to reuse and repurposing. This in itself is, I think, worthwhile; what GNU and Linux provide to the world of operating systems, Wikipedia hopes to provide for the encyclopedia: something that's good enough and not subject to draconian use prevention.

Wikipedia is also a multilingual project [wikipedia.org], with another 37,000 or so entries in the younger sister projects. I believe this is fairly unique among the field of competitors.

(If you want to talk about duplication of effort, though, see the Enciclopedia Libre [enciclopedia.us.es], a fork of the Spanish section of Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] which split last year in protest over a since-repudiated proposal to include optional banner ads on the English section of Wikipedia to help offset the costs of operation.)

And who thought...

rap and scratching would go nowhere?

wiki wiki wiki!

slashdot on wikipedia

apparently the wikipedia is a reference source no slashdotter [wikipedia.org] should be [wikipedia.org] without [wikipedia.org].

Amazingly fast updating

Their page on slashdotting already includes the following: [wikipedia.org]

Wikipedia has been "slashdotted" on July 26, 2001 and January 22, 2003.

Talk about timely information!

so what about slashdot on internationalization?

But not just the English version has grown impressively: More than 37,000 articles are now being worked on in the non-English editions of Wikipedia.

I don't know - I am not completely certain that slashdot editors actually care about this: I mean, action speaks louder than words.

• while posting unicode / asian characters in comments used to be possible, now it is not
• Slashdot *still* does not declare a default character set (UTF-8 would be nice)
• lameness-filter has bugs when it comes to international characters (especially "non-breaking" ones like chinese, korean, and japanese), but it was decided "not going to fix"

Now, I have to admit, maybe they are making progress on it and it's just not public yet... but disabling asian character posting (i was encoding in UTF-8, btw) in comments seem like a backward thing if it was going the "internationalizing" direction.

I sincerely hope that slashdot will be completely UTF-8 someday (it's not that hard, really)... Here's to hoping...

Japanese wikipedia?

I wonder why Japan, a country with so many people, has at most 100 articles, while Sweden has 4302 articles???

making money with it?

Neato concept.
How feasable would you think it be to burn the site to cd and offer it for sale? I think not only would it make an exellent research tool, but it would be a way to give money to the people who put it on as well.
For me it would be pretty cool to have a permanent copy if I made a contribution to the site, a nice way to brag about open software and online collaboration as well. Even if you have to bundle it with a tiny httpd server for windows users, it would still rock. That would be something I would happily throw a chunk of change at.

Not a troll, but a grouse.

It's great to see that this interactive project works

Except that it doesn't. Aside from the dozen+ comments here already speculating about the trustworthiness of the write ups, and aside from their own FAQ sort-of disclaiming any level of accuracy, they lose a lot of backend stuff. For example, I contributed a number of write ups. Good luck trying to find my name on any of them. The revision histories got wiped out at some point. My entries have also been wiped out by random strangers, and even reverting the data back isn't much of an option (the last time I tried this, I couldn't revert either because I needed admin authority, or because it no longer showed me as the original author -- whatever the case, I got tired of pasting in my originals, and losing any GOOD edits that qualified people had made).

I hope it's different now. I gave up on it shortly after the previous slashdot story attracted a ton of people who wanted to screw with the system. I gave up on it because it didn't seem to work well at all. They desperately need moderation systems, the ability to cut off random changes to articles that are verified accurate, the ability to certify people as experts, and so on. All of that could be automated with voting systems. But the people behind the system will need to stop thinking in terms of quantity, and start thinking in terms of quality.

Good news-

For all it's promise, the web has often failed to produce good collaborative projects. It's nice to see one of the handful which have worked reach this milestone. The quality of articles on the site remains excellent. Actually, besides the encyclopedias already mentioned, and the obvious collection such as sourceforge, slashdot et al, what are some of the other examples of succesfull collaborative projects?

Some features are turned off temporarily

In order to survive the Slashdotting as long as possible, some features of Wikipedia have been disabled.

From a Wikipedia developer (Brion):

As temporary measures, I've:

Put up a static HTML copy of the main page for people following the
direct link to http://www.wikipedia.org/ . (It won't reflect new edits
or login state.)

Disabled updates to the page view counters. (They can bunch up when
things are really busy and use all available webserver processes,
stalling new connections.)

Put the heavy special pages that are disabled part of the day into
disable mode full-time (sorry, will re-enable these tomorrow)

Re-enabled the Alternative PHP Cache, which should speed up page load
times a little bit by bypassing the PHP script parsing.

Since APC slightly breaks the current RDF spool generator script, I've
disabled updating of the RDF spools.

Everything 2

Yeah but do they have anything on Everything 2 [everything2.com]?

Troll

You have an article that has nothing to do with Windows/Linux and what do we get.

"It's great to see that this interactive project works; at least I don't have to boot into Windows to use Encarta anymore!"

The maturity on this website is incredible. By the way, what ever happened to Jon Katz?

HHGTTG2

An alternative (and obviously more british) version of this is the Hitchikers Guide to the galaxy 2.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/

(although it appears to have been pre-slashdotted right now)

We need more like this on the Net

I love the fact that Wikipedia exists and shows the real strength of collaborative work on the internet. Project Gutenburg and the archives on Ibiblio also come to mind as great resources on the net.

We should try and have more of these sites mirrored on the Net, IMO. I live in Canada and I don't see why we can't have gov't sponsor mirrors of such information sources. as it would benefit everyone. I'm all for public libraries but this stuff is right at your fingertips and is handy for quick information and its cheaper to run.

Nextt Generation

As with many others, I feel this is great. I've just looked around the site, but didn't see anything regarding citations. I think the next level would be to have a bibliography for each article so that readers wishing to verify facts or to read further would know where to start.

I can't believe this hasn't been suggested before. I hope it is in the works.

In case anyone's interested...

...I was the one who wrote the Slashdot trolling phenomena article. You see in the list of edits the IP address 212.229.115.84? That's me.

I wouldn't throw Encarta away

It may become usefull now that the site is mentioned at /.

Re:Encarta...

Hmmm. I spent quite a few years working on Encarta. Try looking up some typical 8th grade subjects like Walt Whitman.

Here's Encarta's article:
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/R efArticle. aspx?refid=761570898

vs. the Wikipedia article: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitman%2C_Walt

You decide what you want your 8th grader to use as a reference.

Re:IN SOVIET RUSSIA

"In soviet russia", eh? Because of creative trolls like you the Slashdot trolling phenomena entry [wikipedia.org] is yet again out of date.

Re:Burn Them! Err,,, no, wait ....

Well, it's chock full of the kind of people who think 'Metaphysics' is a bookshelf full of crappy paperbacks from Llewllyn Publishing.

So yes, it's sort of 'alternative' and all that, and bound to be crowded with cranks. It's sort of like 'The People's Almanac' from back in the 70s that way.

Re:Noof edits?

Presently 591,369 edits [wikipedia.org] since the July 2002 software upgrade. That includes edits to pages that aren't included in the "article" count -- discussion, meta-information, users' personal pages, and pages that were since deleted or that don't contain complete sentences.

Re:Proof that Wiki doesn't suck

OK that entry was created only last week. Give the process some time will ya?

What you read was only the 4th or 5th draft. If you see the edit history you will find that another contributor (not the original author) removed the less than neutral prose. But the original author put it back in only /hours/ before you read it. The second user hasn't seen the changes yet but other users are discussing the article on the talk page trying to work out the neutrality issue.

In the meantime I have edited the article for neutrality - it still in unbalanced by the fact that most of the entry is about the current alcohol issue, but that will change in time.

You too can edit the article to add other aspects of this man's life.

But to dismiss a whole 2 year old project over a week old article is rather simplistic.

--mav

Re:Proof that Wiki sucks

Since you know about the subject, why didn't you take 5 minutes to fix at least the more obvious errors?

Isn't that up to the programmers?

Isn't that up to the programmers? We're just a bunch of encyclopedists, Hari Seldon style ;-) Veering off-topic some more, the major hurdle to the mainstream success of free software as an MS alternative is the lack of "double click to install" idiot-proof installation for software. Try http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/ -- it's really not inspiring to the average Windows user who decides to try out free software.

System Difficulties

Is Microsoft being evil [msn.com] because I am running Opera or is that a genuine error message?:)

Re:Big Deal

Listing nodes is completely meaningless considering that code snippets are nodes, EVERYTHING is a node, containers, themes, et cetera.

Listing writeups is misleading considering how many of those are probably daylogs.

Re:MIsguided

If free software documentation is what you think is most important, get to work! Sitting around and griping about other people's projects will certainly not change anything.