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!"

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

[saitoh]

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?

Quality?

[Jason1729]

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]

Wiki for documentation

[DrEspenA]

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.

Re:Free is good

[SN74S181]

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.

Japanese wikipedia?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Japanese wikipedia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well up until very recently the software we use couldn't really deal with Asian fonts. That has now changed.

But a wiki needs at least 4 or 5 people working on it for some time before it can be self-sustaining: a critical mass of starter articles are also needed - like year pages, policy and help pages. Articles for big topics like Biology, Mathematics etc also need to be written (at least in outline form). Also, the interface really needs to be translated from English. All that isn't much fun and takes a lot of dedication since it isn't that fun working on a wiki alone. As a matter of fact there are at least several Japanese-speaking contributors to the English Wikipedia that haven't contributed much to the Japanese Wikipedia.

--mav

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

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you're not the only one. They have a ridiculous position on word censorship, choosing to st*r most of the letters out if someone might find it offensive. I mean, what the fuck? It's not as if you can't discern what the word actually is.

Also, if the BBC is maintaining media silence on a topic and you post on it, your post will be deleted. This happened recently on a "what music are you listening to?" thread - someone posted that they were listening to something by the Who. And because Pete Townsend was in the news recently as a suspected paedophile, the post got removed - it wasn't even talking about the case! Same with John Leslie a while ago for those rape allegations. *Everything* mentioning his name was removed.

It's totally ridiclous. How they expect to foster a balanced community in such repressive circumstances I have no idea.

Add to that the massive proliferation of IM-style smiley icons and it becomes this big AOL-style chat room type place. I agree with you, they are totally taking this down the pan. Which is a shame, 'cause it has (had?) so much potential.

As for the DNA writing style .. yeah, I know what you mean. Humour is best left to those who are funny, who have that style. But hey, it's no worse than Slashdot being overrun by Linux fanboys.

Some features are turned off temporarily

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Encarta...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, compare them now

Encarta:
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/RefArticle. aspx?refid=761570898

Wikipedia:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman

I incorporated much of the biographical details from the Encarta article into Wikipedia, rewriting the information, of course. Notice also that the Wikipedia article has more cross-references. That being said, the article still needs work, and I would still give Encarta the edge on this topic. However, perhaps a Whitman fan or two will notice the page on Recent Changes [wikipedia.org] and work on it. Maybe in a few days, Wikipedia's will be better.

Hmmm. I spent quite a few years working on Encarta.

The key words in this sentence are "quite a few years". Encarta has been around since 1993 and has the professional muscle that comes with being a Microsoft project. Also, MS bought the rights to the text of Funk and Wagnall's encyclopedia to start them off.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, is two years old (just a toddler!), is staffed by volunteers, and has only parts of public domain reference works (1923 and earlier, along with US government publications) to draw on (and they're often not much help). You would think that our Walt Whitman page would say "5r|ptK1ddi3 0wns j00!", but it doesn't. Wikipedia is quite amazing, and the quality is only improving.

Help us! When you compare a Wikipedia article to one from Encarta and find Wikipedia's lacking, do something about it! Pull the information from the Encarta article (and rewrite it!) and help build the world's largest copyleft encyclopedia.

Stephen Gilbert (who has lost his Slashdot password)