Wikipedia Hits Million-Entry Mark

Sir Homer writes "The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the one millionth article in Wikipedia. Started in January 2001, Wikipedia is currently both the world's largest encyclopedia and fastest-growing, with articles under active development in over 100 languages. Nearly 2,500 new articles are added to Wikipedia each day, along with ten times that number of updates to existing articles. Wikipedia now ranks as one of the ten most popular reference sites on the Internet, according to Alexa.com. It is increasingly used as a resource by students, journalists, and anyone who needs a starting point for research. Wikipedia's rate of growth has continued to increase in recent months, and at its current pace Wikipedia will double in size again by next spring." stevejobsjr writes "Wikipedia needs our help. The Wikipedia project has no ads, and is run completely by volunteers. Still, it takes money to run such an amazing resource, and so they are running a fundraiser. The goal is to raise $50,000."

Yes

But how much do we REALLY need to know about Klingon or memetics?

Woah, hold off with that "-1 troll", I'm joking - albeit semi-seriously. Wikipedia is a great resource, and so far seems to do a pretty good job of keeping itself in check by the sheer volume of people checking each other's work.. but there is also the risk of important aspects being missed, or errors creeping in unchecked, as highlighted in a previous slashdot story.

Still a great resource though, but one best used in conjunction with more traditional ones than as a replacement to them, IMO

Re:Yes

But how much do we REALLY need to know about Klingon or memetics?

Actually, I find it useful to have a reference work for all those things that are too geeky, obscure, or recent to be in proper encyclopedias. For the things I'm interested in, Wikipedia tends to be the best thing to use.

Re:Yes

Still a great resource though, but one best used in conjunction with more traditional ones than as a replacement to them, IMO

I don't think Wikipedia was ever meant to replace the traditional library. Its strength has always been in tracking popular culture and trends, cultures, pop artifacts and events that are recent and/or developing. The fact that Wikipedia is ever-changing is a good thing in that regard, because the topics it covers best are in the process of change too.

Re:Yes

And what makes you trust the research of, say, Encyclopedia Britannica?

Back when I used to use encyclopedias on CD-ROM, often the topics I wanted to find out about had nothing, or maybe just a single paragraph.

With Wikipedia, if that was the case, after I had found some other resources, I could share my new found knowledge with the rest of humanity by submitting it to Wikipedia.

a whole paragraph?

I know the feeling:

Back when I used to use encyclopedias on CD-ROM, often the topics I wanted to find out about had nothing, or maybe just a single paragraph.

It's not just CD-ROM encyclopedias... Two words:

Mostly harmless.

Re:Yes

But how much do we REALLY need to know about Klingon or memetics?

Or Carlsbad Caverns National Park [wikipedia.org], or Miles Davis [wikipedia.org] or the Heavy metal umlaut [wikipedia.org] or Buddhism [wikipedia.org] or Elizabeth I [wikipedia.org] or Horatio Nelson [wikipedia.org] or....

Its far from perfect, but Wikipedia has come a long way from being the Encyclopedia That Slashdot Built...

Re:Yes

It's never been the encyclopedia that Slashdot built. Everything2 [everything2.com] is. In fact, before there was Everything2, there was everything.slashdot.org. The code was created by some of the same people as Slashdot, and so was a content. For a while, Slashdot used to link to E2 articles using "[?]" links. Of course, unlike Wikipedia articles, you can't just start to improve them. Everything2 is a very geeky system that takes a long time to grok, with a complex, role-playing style experience model that hooks people.

Wikipedia started out as the progeny of Nupedia, a very serious, peer-reviewed encyclopedia which managed to produce all of two dozen articles. If you look at the Wayback Machine [archive.org] in July 2001, you will find that Wikipedia early on was actually quite philosophy-centric (in part because the original, full-time chief editor, Larry Sanger, is a philsopher).

Of course we have Slashdot readers among our editors, including myself. But we also have credentialed experts and amateurs from many different fields. We try to make it as easy as possible to join in, and many people who know nothing about computers do. If you (the reader, not the parent poster) know a way to make Wikipedia easier to use, please do not hesitate to submit a feature request [wikipedia.org].

We don't go around deleting articles on geeky subjects if they're well-written and encyclopedic. But Wikipedia never aimed exclusively at a nerdy audience and its editors were never made up exclusively of members of that audience.

Re:Yes

I'm replying to my own post, because wow, I didn't expect that first line to generate so much heat... thou shalt not speak of Klingon or memetics in any less than revered tones, I guess

It was meant as a tongue in cheek line - and for what it's worth, I find memetics a very interesting subject, along with plenty of other geeky things (i'll.. uh.. pass on the Klingon though, thanks)

My point was simply that Wikipedia, by it's very nature, tends to lend itself to being extremely detailed in specific areas of interest that appeal to it's readership and contributor-ship (such as Klingon or memetics). That's not necessarily any bad thing, and in fact, you probably won't find any other encyclopedia anywhere with such a level of detail on some of the more obscure subjects in Wikipedia.. however, my main point (which I don't think I emphasised enough looking back on it) stands.. that Wikipedia is NOT a replacement to more traditional information resources, but a very good compliment to them

and as for the guy who said I was just going for a "+5 not completely stupid", feel free to mod me overrated if you want.. personally I don't think my first post should be at +5 either, but then I've long since given up on understanding /. moderators logic.. but at least it's better than another GNAA trollfest

Re:Yes

My point was simply that Wikipedia, by it's very nature, tends to lend itself to being extremely detailed in specific areas of interest that appeal to it's readership and contributor-ship.

s/Wikipedia/Slashdot/
s/Wikipedia/Telephone directory/
s/Wikipedia/the bible/

s/Wikipedia/any document/

So what?

I think the quality of the articles matter more than the mass. A smaller number of good, well-edited articles on topics that people actually care about would be better.

The worst part of the whole thing is how Wikipedia is gradually making so many Google searches useless. More and more i find myself typing some term into Google, and getting back a number of "reference" sites that simply grab all the content from Wikipedia and slap advertisements on. Sometimes the whole first page of Google results is like this recently. Aaargh.

Re:So what?

how Wikipedia is gradually making so many Google searches useless... a number of "reference" sites that simply grab all the content from Wikipedia and slap advertisements on.

And for this you blame wikipedia? That's like blaming Led Zeppelin for the existence of Motley Crue and hair metal.

Here we go again

You're beef seems to be wikipedia is not any good because it has some bad articles and it's impossible to know what article is good and what article is bad. Here's a tip. Don't use 1 source.

ANYONE who takes into account only 1 source is a moron, unless they don't truly care about accuracy.

Wikipedia is 1 source and anyone who uses it exclusively is a moron as all people who only take 1 source into account are either morons or very trusting. Let's take Hatshepsut [wikipedia.org] for example.

The published historian Gardner claims that she was an overbearing mother who Thutmose III hated. For his proof he states the fact a lot of Hatshepsut's reliefs have been destroyed and replaced with other people and that this is obviously indicative of his pent up frustration and anger at her.

Gae Callendar (another published historian) says that this is completely false and that there's proof that the relief's were destroyed long after Thutmose III and that even if he DID do it, this was common practise amongst the Egyptian Pharoahs so it isn't indicative that he hated her, but was just following Egyptian tradition.

Gardner says that Hatshepsut wasn't a true Pharaoh because she didn't have enough military campaigns, Callendar says she was and that Gardner is just comparing her to the people that had the MOST military campaigns which is unfair and that she had more campaigns then other pharaohs and Gardner admits they're true Pharaohs.

Now I never read a book that laid out the information just as I did. I learnt all that by reading SEVERAL books. If I had only read 1 book I would have had an unbalanced viewpoint, such as the one evident in this page [touregypt.net] with the quote

(Unfortunately many were damaged or destroyed when someone - most likely Thuthmose III - tried to erase her name and image from every monument that may have had her name.)

Though this seems a little drastic, there was obviously bitter feelings against Hatshepsut.

I would say Wikiepdia has a better article on this subject as it says

The traditional belief among historians is that Thutmose III was responsible; however, researchers such as Charles Nims? and Peter Dorman? have examined these erasures and found that those which can be dated were done after year 42 of Thutmose's reign. As with many detail about Hatshepsut, historians have opposing views on who defaced her monuments.

Congrats to wikipedia.

Congrats to all the people of Wikipedia! Nowadays I spend a lot of time "surfing" Wikipedia -- I start on one subject and keep clicking interesting links until somehow I end up somewhere totally different and have a cursory grasp of at least a half dozen new subjects. This used to be a favourite passtime on the web many years back, but has since lost a lot of its appeal.

Despite a few criticisms from those who have to criticise everything, the fact is that Wikipedia is one of the best sources of information on the web. It's a great place to start the learning process, it's got a little something on virtually every topic, and it's FREE.

(That's free as in information, not free as in beer.)

before you ask

before you ask how wikipedia will *ever* work by allowing everybody to write, take a look at this quote:

According to a Wall Street Journal article from February 2004, researchers have found that there are frequent instances of vandalism at Wikipedia, but that these are often quickly resolved:

"Recent research by a team from IBM found that most vandalism suffered by Wikipedia had been repaired within five minutes. That's fast: 'We were surprised at how often we found vandalism, and then surprised again at how fast it was fixed,' says Martin]Wattenberg, a researcher in the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, in Cambridge, Mass." [7]

-source [wikipedia.org]

Congrats to Wikipedia for the 1 millionth entry...and (less easily measured) even more interesting [wikipedia.org], deep [wikipedia.org], and thoughtful [wikipedia.org] articles.

Before you say ..

• .."why should I trust Wikipedia, it's written by random people"?
• .."there's been a successful experiment [frozennorth.org] of inserting false information..."
• "the neutral point of view doesn't work"
• "it's just an encyclopedia .."

Please read this:

Wikipedia has now hit another quantitative milestone (we reached 500,000 articles in the same year). It is now clear that volunteers can build a free, structured information resource which rivals all such proprietary resources. This is an accomplishment of immense importance, but it is not the end goal.

Article review

Wikipedia is not perfect yet. But from day one, we've been thinking about and tinkering with quality control mechanisms. The one which is currently in active use is the Featured Article Candidates [wikipedia.org] nomination process as well as the Votes for deletion [wikipedia.org] negative equivalent. There's also a peer review page [wikipedia.org] which is in active use.

These are just trial balloons. They're not the end product, the peer review process which we need. There's a WikiProject Fact and Reference Check [wikipedia.org] formed to explore a review system centered around individual factual statements in an article. I have also proposed [gmane.org] such a system. There's also an article rating system that is currently in the CVS version of MediaWiki [sourceforge.net], our free wiki software.

We are all aware of the problem, and we all know that we have to fix this problem before Wikipedia can be a trusted authority. Doing this kind of systematic quality review will require the same level of dedication and effort as creating the encyclopedia in the first place. But we will do it, and not too far from now you will read "1000 reviewed articles", "10000 reviewed articles" announcements, and so on. And this review will be more in-depth than the review process of any traditional encyclopedia, because it will be done by thousands of volunteers from all political and religious persuasions.

There will always be an unstable edition of Wikipedia where you can go to read the latest information, with a big caveat lector sign on the front door. But we will also build a stable edition which we will distribute to the entire planet.

Neutrality

The Neutral Point of View [wikipedia.org] is our guiding principle. However, that does not mean that it is the only way to write articles. Because Wikipedia's content is free, you can take it and start a fork that is written using a different methodology.

There's Wikinfo [wikinfo.org], which presents a "sympathetic point of view" on the main article, and critical views on separate pages. There's Disinfopedia [disinfopedia.org] and dKosopedia [dkosopedia.com], which makes use of some of our content and develop it from a political/progressive perspective.

We will support dynamic cross-project transclusion of our content so that it will be easy to set up a project fork with a different policy. Wikipedia will always be the largest knowledge repository, but if you want the "truth" from a particular point of view, you will be able to consult a resource that is written by people who share that point of view. You can start such a fork right now if you want to - just download the database [wikimedia.org] and get going.

It's more than an encyclopedia

The Wikimedia Foundation [wikimediafoundation.org] currently operates Wikip

Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs?

Or do they? (I have not found).
At $15-25 a disc they could've get enough money to maintain it IMHO. It hurts me when I see free projects begging with the bowl. :(

Slashdot effect

A good thing about Wikipedia is that it has entries that won't make it to other more "respected" sources until much later. This is good for all sorts of cultural phenomenons, especially web/technical related.

An example is The Slashdot Effect [wikipedia.org].

If Wikipedia's entry for the Effect would suffer from it after being discussed here, the world would certainly implode in a puff of poetic logic would it not?

wikimedia for law school

I've been using the wikimedia software for briefing and note-taking at law school. It's perfect for the job. The syntax for links, outlining, highlighting, etc is simple and really perfect for the job. Not to mention the automatic toc, searches, etc . . .

I don't understand why anyone would use word, or oneNote for that matter (which a lot of my peers do). For my money (free!), wikimedia beats 'em all hands down.

Anyone else using this tech for school?

Wikipedia helped me

Wikipedia is a terrific medium for obscure and specialised information that would not be of interest to a publisher of a traditional encyclopedia.

As and example, my daughter was recently diagnosed with an extremely rare condition called Opsoclonus Myoclonus Syndrome [wikipedia.org]. It only effects about 1 in 10,000,000 people per year, so you can imagine the difficulty we had finding information and medical practitioners who knew anything about it. I searched the Web and found lots of information and other people with the same condition, but it took a long time to find what I wanted and the information was fragmented and often very old, but eventually I knew more that any of the medical specialists we have been seeing. I wanted to share my knowledge, so I build my own web site, played with a blog, but then it hit me, Wikipedia! So created the OMS page and put all of the knowledge I had collected into it. My daughter will get better and we will forget the horrible episode, but the wikipedia page will live and grow and continue to help people long after I stop maintaining it.

This sort of information is only going to be accessed by small number of people, but it will be extremely valueable. Thanks Wikipedia!

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

The Wikipedia is not an authoritative source.

Well, duh. Now then, I'd like you to tell me who is and authoritative source.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

There are no authorative sources, really. You should be consulting multiple sources, and if differences can't be reconciled, consider not using the sources that have problems. Trusting a source just because it's from a large company isn't a good idea.

Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

I look at it this way. Sure Wikipedia is not the most dependable source out there. But for a generation that will believe anything on a REGULAR webpage, wikipedia is a God send. Its simply better than 99% of sources on the internet because it can be changed.

The days of solid sources for non-academic work are long gone. All we need is good enough, thats what Wikipedia is.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

What a stupid comment. Do you really think a "normal" encyclopedia can't be wrong? At least with Wikipedia, articles are constantly checked and updated. I suppose the five year old encyclopedia on your bookshelf has more accurate info on, say, Iraq, huh? Also, Wikipedia articles have their references listed, so it's easy to verify the info.

Yes, Wikipedia is "do-it-yourself". And it's damn good. It ranks, IMHO, as one of the best general knowledge sources out there.

All your comment did was to present well known facts in an overly dramatic and inflammatory manner. You, sir, are a troll.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

The myth that Wikipedia is a plethora of incorrect knowledge is such a load of bullshit. In my school years, I reguarly found errors and anomalies in the textbooks, and kist count of the times I sat at home as a young kid and found factual errors in my encyclopedias & sceience books.

Wikipedia ISN'T gospel and certainly has quite a lot of errors, but to suggest that it's 'not authoritative' is a load of rubbish. In a printed encyclopeda (i.e. those pretentious brittanica things rich white middle class families seem to hav eon display), you depend on a select number of individuals to share their knowledge.

There's nothing to suggest that these people could be any more 'authoritative' than someone submitting on Wikipedia; Don't forget that the net is packed full of bored but highly intelligent 'geeks'... just read some of the more insightful/interesting slashdot comments in the sceintific articles & you'll see that the intellect of some people on the net surpasses that of the 'encyclopedia book writing' variety. Whatever suggests that the article in my brittanica encyclopedia WASN'T written by someone who knows less about the subject than myself, but has a good textbook to hand.

I'd never trust Wikipedia as being the absolute truth, but then again, as a kid & ever since, I've never trusted textbooks and the such to be 100% accurate.

Comments like yours are what gives - what is wholly a selfless project - a bad name for no really good reason. If they were intentionally creating their own little rift, i'd be annoyed, but it's all in the name of free information.

For someone like me who left education much MUCH erlier than I was ever advised to, but was always a very high scoring individual at school, I enjoy the resource because it means I can learn new things in my own time... not forgetting to use my head and check the validity of the content before I concrete it in my brain. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's learnt a lot of stuff just by clicking 'random page' a few times a day...

Re:Who here has contributed?

I've contributed, but it's easy.

I don't be having the best grammar, or anything, but a simple edit here and there can really help.

Take for example a article about the city where I live. For most (or all) cities there are lists of famous people from that city. I noticed some obscure, but a few notable, people were left out. All I had to do was stick them in there with a few brackets around their names and Viola!

An easy way to get started is to look for stub articles [wikipedia.org] and go from there. Many times the stub articles have related information already on Wikipedia. And many times the information can be gathered from the Internet and texts you already own. Grab a book of the shelf and write about the topic in your own words. See, you don't have to be the expert - people have already written volumes on most subjects.

Another way to get started with stub pages is to find a stub that has an official website. This article [wikipedia.org] is a good example. Even biography stubs are good candidates for this considering most actors (for example) have their own web sites today. Earlier I noticed that Lou Rawls [wikipedia.org] was a stub page. I simply put his official page as an "External Link" and listed it on "pages needing attention [wikipedia.org]" with a note and link telling everyone that he has an official bio. While the page isn't beautiful at this point it is starting out.

One last way to start out is just by surfing around reading things your interested in. If you notice that "Star Wars" links to "Luke Skywalker" but not the other way around then you can fix that. If you notice a sentence misworded or a word spelled wrong you can fix that too.

I'd recommend creating a user name because this allows you to later on claim certain articles as your own. By this I mean; even though you aren't the expert now, you could be someday. Imagine adding that to your resume. "I've created 150 articles for the Internet's free encyclopedia project" or something to that effect. It can help explain what you've been doing between jobs. Looks like charity work almost.

Even input on Wikipedia's discussion pages can help. There are several articles that seemed weird or unclear to me and all I did was suggest another route. It's worked in a few cases. Sometimes editors just need another point of view.