Wikipedia Reaches 1,000,000 Articles 257
AndrewRUK writes "At 23:09 UTC, the one-millionth article was created in the English-language Wikipedia. The milestone was reached with the creation of an article about Jordanhill railway station in Scotland. Congratulations to all the Wikipedians, especially Nach0king who wrote the millionth article and Mészáros András who in November 2004 correctly predicted that it would be created today."
In the making for a while... (Score:3, Interesting)
And to think that their original goal was 100,000 articles...
what a 1 million means (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, my results...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Franklin [wikipedia.org] (~1 paragraph + links)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederika_Amalia_of_
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_The_Hague [wikipedia.org] (1 paragraph + 1 sentence)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governors_of_Tamil_N
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ja%E2%80%99afar_Abdu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones [wikipedia.org] (decent sized article)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matte_Babel [wikipedia.org] (1+ paragraph)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Boa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derbyshire_lead_mini
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pelham%2C_2nd
Note: This is not a jab at Wikipedia, which I love reading/contributing to, but rather a demonstration of how much work is still needed to flesh out its body of articles. A million articles/stubs is a fun benchmark to celebrate, but let's not let that slow down our contributions any... we still need everyone's help than can!
Re:Vogon Edition (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I missed out (Score:3, Interesting)
I would note though that during the beta test all profits are being donated to charity, with over $4,000 raised so far. So if it was declared as the one millionth article it wouldn't have actually been a big deal, but I suppose perception is everything.
Re:Does size matter? (Score:3, Interesting)
That doesn't always happen, though, and popular articles tend to occasionally get someone who'll come through and do a major edit that restructures and rewords the article--refactoring, if you will.
Besides, even the somewhat poorly written articles on Wikipedia, in my experience, tend to hold their own against the writing in a lot of textbooks, periodicals, manuals, and other information-oriented nonfiction. There's a lot of very bad writing out there.
Re:plagiarism, outdated sources and pure propagand (Score:1, Interesting)