Wikipedia Hits Million-Entry Mark 348
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."
How nice to be asked (Score:3, Interesting)
I like the fund raising approach as it will allow them to be useful and ad free.
Can you think of any other sites who might've benefited from this user friendly approach?
Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia. (Score:5, Interesting)
before you ask (Score:5, Interesting)
-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.
Re:Yes (Score:2, Interesting)
um. (Score:2, Interesting)
The serious question is: how good is the quality of information in the typical wikipedia article? That's the question that you'll see all the fanatics avoid frantically, either by pretending to have answered it ("it gets better all the time"), by blaming the critic ("that's *your* fault for not spending 3 hours a week editing Wikipedia!"), or just saying something completely unrelated ("...whenever somebody notices obvious vandalism 5 minutes after the fact, they revert it right away").
Congratulations. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's even worse, because the piece that the poster linked was written to debunk the sort of canned response that you offer. To rephrase the "discussion":
[Grandparent poster]: "Contrary to Wikipedia zealots' insistence that vandalism in Wikipedia is corrected almost instantly, I can demonstrate that it's really easy to do it in such a way that survives for many days."
[You]: "Vandalism in Wikipedia is corrected almost instantly!"
Wikipedia is a great research tool... (Score:2, Interesting)
Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
An invaluable resource (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm friends with someone in marketing for a _large_ multi-national organisation and I know for a fact that they use upwards of 50 people in their marketing campaigns to visit websites to post innacurate information. "Buy product X. It's better than product Y. I've used it and it's true!"
Now translate that to Wikipedia and select something that you want to influence. "Windows LongDredgeUphillWarrior 2043 is the best due to it's powerful features - etc". How much would it cost you to hire 10 people to 'maintain' this information for a year?
The more popularity WikiP is the more likely this sort of disinformation will become.
Just my paranoia probably but the possibility for it is there. I realise other information sources are suceptible to this form of manipulation too but it's worth bearing it in mind when you're researching with WikiP as I know many assume the information is valid because it's checked by 'many eyeballs'!
Are you Al Fastold or are you just quoting him? (Score:3, Interesting)
Librarian: Don't use Wikipedia as source [syracuse.com]
Journalist: Wikipedia is "outrageous," "repugnant" and dangerous" [boingboing.net]
and
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20040825/0238210
Actually, I like this Syracuse Post Standard-rant because it led into a quality check by Edward Felte. [freedom-to-tinker.com]
fundraiser (Score:4, Interesting)
The really interesting pages... (Score:4, Interesting)
Look right down at the bottom [wikipedia.org]
Re:So what? (Score:2, Interesting)
Fool.
Slashdot effect (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Yes (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's a metric. (Score:2, Interesting)
wikimedia for law school (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Yes (Score:4, Interesting)
If you use the Random Page link, you very often get a place in the US, which makes me wonder how much of the wikipedia consists of these entries!
There used to be a mention in the Southern Sri Lanka page of the Mexican Staring Frog, which as any fuly kno is a fictional animal from South Park. I removed the reference, but how much more crud is there in there?
.
Fundraising slashdot effect (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wikipedia is a great research tool... (Score:2, Interesting)
When I was writing a diploma on image transforms and desperately needed a source to tell me not only the math part, but also what the transforms are typically used for, Wikipedia saved me. I did tread through a couple dozen books and more than half the relevant web trying to find a more "credible" source, but Wikipedia simply was best. My profs apparently agreed, and nothing can be more "right" than that.
The only source error I ever found in my reearch was on an (otherwise informative) website. If that had been in Wikipedia, I'd have corrected the mistake. As it is, the mistake is still there to mislead people who don't refer to the (correct) Wikipedia article.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Interesting)
This is where I agree and disagree.
Sure, Wikipedia can get you information on the stuff you're interested in.
The coolest thing is (IMHO) that you can find out about topics you never knew you had interests in. This is the cool thing about any wiki. The ability to link pages that have nothing to do with each other can open the reader's eyes to new topics.
I find myself browsing Wikipedia all day sometimes reading about things I care nothing about because it's cool to at least check it out.
Re:Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs? (Score:3, Interesting)
A DVD would be obsolete the second it was created. It goes against the whole idea of Wikipedia.
Re:Yes (Score:3, Interesting)
Win $$$ using Wikipedia (Score:2, Interesting)
FYI charolais [wikipedia.org] is indeed a breed of cattle.
Wikipedia helped me (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Yes (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Versioning: If I say I got something from the 1975 Encyclopaedia Brittanica, you can go and check that I got my reference right. Then you can check if the fact was right in that version. With wiki, if I say I got it from the 20.2.2002 wiki, simply finding out if I got the quote right can be a problem.
2. Continuity: Most books fix errors as the version number increases. There is no gaurantee of continuity in the wiki system.
3. Editorship: Most other sources have clear lines about which author is responsible for a whole article, and one person who is responsible for seeing that facts are preserved and false statements are reviewed. There is no clear line of responsibility in a wiki article.
These three things make wikipedia less reliable than other media (but no less reliable than any other website)
Re:Before you say .. (Score:3, Interesting)
My gut feeling is that the split is about 50/40/10, but perhaps you have better information. Until the wikipedia consists largely of verified information, its value remains greatly diminished.
Re:An invaluable resource (Score:2, Interesting)
I found out that it's quite "common practice". Also, the 50 users are paid to "discuss" and "promote" the product. I don't believe there's ever any mention of astroturfing but it's heavily implied in the way bonuses are made and also from the supervisors who look after each team.
It's not right.
A product should be bought based on it's merits but how will you ever find out if it's worthy of your Dollars/Euros/Yuan/Dinars?
The worst aspect of this sort of marketing is that the very action of combating this is the very action that makes it so successful - vote with your wallet and buy the product that you hear is the best for the job...
Authorative Source? Soon! (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedia is currently working to reference all the facts on it. There is a project set up to do it also here Fact and Reference Check [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org]. Here is a quote:
There isn't any reason why every fact couldn't be referenced making Wikipedia one of the most authoritative sources of information ever created.
There is still discussion on how best to do this so feel free to join up. Also feel free to encourage the people who write the Wikimedia program too add in this tab feature (don't encourage too hard though, they are volunteers :o) )
Re:Slashdot effect (Score:4, Interesting)
First, they have more traffic than slashdot to begin with. (By now, it should be A LOT MORE).
Second, they use a squid array to dynamically cache requests. Its a 3 layer system: Database->Apache->Squid. If a lot of traffic goes to the same article, the requests wont even reach the apaches... (and you would need A TON of people to overload the squids, because even at 80% caching efficiency 1000hits/s dont crash them)
My Biggest Complaint (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, I was reading some articles about music theory the other day (something I kno^Kew nothing about), and it was *dense* like a brick. If the point of the articles were to educate, then they were failing; they were describing beginner-level information, but they were doing it in a way that goes over the heads of most beginers.
I've noticed the same thing happening to some articles I've helped with. I try to write in a way that's accessible to the layman, but then later some self-important expert comes by and adds extra minutiae that obfuscate the points of the article, extra un-explained un-linked vocabulary that confuses the reader, and meaningless tangents that distract from the focus.
It's hard to keep up (and so, I haven't been). But please, keep my words in mind when editing! Particularly if you wrote the bits on music theory. Remember, you're writing to educate BEGINERS, not to impress your peers with how much trivia and jargon you know.
Wikipedia needs spell-check (Score:2, Interesting)
It really was a brain-dead speling mistake, too, and a simple check presenting a list of possibly mispelled words before confirming a check-in would be a big help.
Re:speaking of which... (Score:2, Interesting)
*** Ponder
This is on my next to donate to list (Score:3, Interesting)
Today I donated to FireFox [mozillastore.com], actually I got one of the new T-Shirts and some stickers to put on my car but that counts right? It felt great. Sure it was a bit much for a T-Shirt, but I know that the profit is going to something I actually care about and I can only imagine how happy I will feel wearing that shirt around town, speaking the word of mozilla to all who ask about my shirt.
Next on my list to donate to is the EFF [eff.org], and I think I get a nifty bumper sticker for that too.
I really want to donate to wikipedia, I use it all the time. I find myself getting bored, then researching something random on wikipedia, and an hour later I've got 50 tabs open in FireFox and I'm super happy. I just thought I would point out to everyone that Wikipedia has T-Shirts available at cafepress.com/wikipedia [cafepress.com].
Ok, enjoy the rest of your day.