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."

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Well, CBS might be a start.

Perhaps...

[nimid]

...they should make that $100,000...?

"Connection to server en.wikipedia.org failed (The server is not responding.)"

Re:So what?

[bhima]

well... they did have long hair... maybe hair spray tech just wasn't up to it back then ;)

a whole paragraph?

[feepcreature]

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

[Lt Cmdr Tuvok]

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

The merits of memetics are not fully known to me, but you can be assured that any knowledge of Klingons will be most useful in the future, when humans will meet them personally. I believe the old human phrase, 'Know your enemy' is most applicable in this case.

Re:fundraiser

[aussie_a]

Why don't they stop submitting their site to slashdot? That should cut down on their bandwidth.

Wikipedia's cabal

[Anonymous Coward]

Novices may say that "anyone can edit" Wikipedia, but it's not that simple. Wikipedia is run by Jimbo Wales, who said [wikipedia.org] that "[he] is not by any stretch of the mind leftist politically, philosophically or otherwise!", and "[m]any years ago, [he] was an Undergraduate and a huge fan of Ayn Rand....". The people he gave admin privileges are of a similar ilk, one prominent one is a Moonie, and they work together.

As far as entries on this or that, Wikipedia may be fine. As far as articles about history, news, or politics, there is a very heavy American bias, in fact it is basically a white collar American's view of the world encyclopedia.

For example, the entry for "East Germany" (before a friendly editor came across it) opened with: "East Germany, formally the German Democratic Republic (GDR), German Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), was a Communist satellite state of the former Soviet Union which, together with West Germany, existed from 1949 to 1990 in Germany." One wonders why it would be said on the East Germany page that it was a "satellite state of the former Soviet Union" and someone of that point of view would not say that West Germany was a satellite state of the USA.

It just presents a very upper middle class American view of the world. Muslims/Arabs/Middle Easterners are always in the wrong, the US and Israel is always right. All socialist countries, from the Eastern Europeans to the Chinese to Latin American ones and so forth, are all bad, while the US was spreading freedom and democracy around the world, from Vietnam to Chile. In fact, most of the history of countries comes from the CIA Factbook, the US State Department, or even the Overseas Private Investment Corporation like the "History of Colombia [wikipedia.org]" article. That gives you an idea of what this history is grounded in.

Anyhow, it's become apparent to me and other people that this is just the way it is, and will be as long as Jimbo Wales runs it and his cabal controls it. There are alternative wikis out there such as Infoshop Open Wiki [infoshop.org] which is a wiki where a "people's history" of the world is beginning to be written. There are also other good wikis like Disinfopedia [disinfopedia.org] which deal with lobbyists, PACs, PR firms and so forth.

I think this is just something we learned after a long time on Wikipedia seeing how it was this way, and despite anyone supposedly being able to edit and a supposed neutral point of view policy, the inability of that to exist since there is a cabal of administrators trying to keep their point of view on top. If you want to read a history of the world not written by the US State Department, I suggest looking at the nascent efforts of Wikinfo [wikinfo.org], Disinfopedia [disinfopedia.org], dKosopedia [dkosopedia.com], Infoshop Open Wiki [infoshop.org], and other alternative GFDL corpus access providers.