English Wikipedia Reaches 3 Million Articles 192
FunPika writes "It has taken more than eight years and the work of vast numbers of people around the world, but the English version of Wikipedia has finally amassed more than three million articles.
The site broke through the 3 million barrier early on Monday morning UK time, with the honors taken by a short article about Norwegian actor Beate Eriksen — a 48-year-old cast member of a popular local soap opera."
Re:Beate Ericksen! (Score:3, Informative)
Beate
He
Did Beate recently get a sex change or something? Last time I checked, Beate was a female.
Re:It's come a long way (Score:5, Informative)
[citation needed] [wikipedia.org]
Seriously, mods, please check to see if stuff like this is real by checking out sources [wikipedia.org] before modding posts up.
Re:It's come a long way (Score:5, Informative)
Lest anyone be confused:
1. WikiWikiWeb [wikipedia.org] was founded by Ward Cunningham, not Jimmy Wales; and focused on cataloguing software patterns, not Simpsons episodes.
2. The direct precursor to Wikipedia was MeatballWiki [wikipedia.org], a wiki based on a new wiki engine, UseModWiki (which Wikipedia would adopt for its initial period), and focused on online culture.
3. Wikipedia was formed as a side project of Nupedia [wikipedia.org], an attempt to produce an open-content encyclopedia along more traditional lines (get volunteer writers, editors, a review process, have professors submit draft manuscripts, attach author names---usually a single author---to articles, etc.). The idea was that Wikipedia could be used as work space where people collected and organized the information, making it easier to write Nupedia articles. It never really cracked up that way, as the workspace itself quickly became a lot better encyclopedia than Nupedia ever was.
Re:And then it was proptly deleted (Score:3, Informative)
Although amusing to ponder, I don't think there's any real question. The deletionist controversy has only ever been over edge cases, some of them high profile, but always swamped by the huge numbers of new articles that nobody's attempted to delete. Even if deletionists won on some really major class of article---delete all Pokemon characters, maybe---it'd at best be only a blip in the time v. # of articles graph.
Re:It's come a long way (Score:3, Informative)
I am not sure whether to despise or marvel at above poster. He consistenly posts drivel yet gets modded up just as consistently. I have read several of his posts where he puts together lengthy words that mean absolutely nothing when put beside each other. Yet, despite being utter non-sense (far beyond an argument that makes no sense, really, truly nonsensical) he gets modded up to +4 and +5.
See this post, which at one time made it to +5 Insightful: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1335281&cid=29052559&art_pos=4 [slashdot.org]. Then go through the rest of his posting history.
Much like a train wreck, I can't take my eyes off of these posts and the ensuing up mods. I think I have answered my own question. This man is a troll. But a damn good one.
And Slashdot should run a query and find anyone who has modded him up. Then they should not only ban these people from modding, but from visiting Slashdot at all.
Re:And then it was proptly deleted (Score:2, Informative)
Notability defined (Score:5, Informative)
Anybody else find it ironic that the site that has descriptions of objects like the lightsaber [wikipedia.org] and "events" like Battle of the Line [wikipedia.org] deletes articles about actual people and/or places because they aren't noteworthy?
Not especially. Wikipedia defines notability [wikipedia.org] as "several different reliable sources have written about it", irrespective of whether the subject exists in the real world or only in fiction. The best-known melee weapon from the Star Wars films certainly qualifies.
Re:Let me defend the Wikipedia here (Score:4, Informative)
Every time someone makes an article, that's one more article admins have to baby-sit.
If admins have to babysit each article, something is wrong. And in fact they don't have to. There are already spam prevention bots that do it for them. The entire deletionist argument has absolutely no standing, and is only a weak attempt of control freaks to justify their behavior.
It's amazing that admins are able to keep the vandalism under control as much as they have been able to.
Keeping vandalism under control is actually easy because they can't really delete anything - everything is preserved in the revsion history. And the common trait of people responsible for vandalism is that they are easily bored - revert them 2 or 3 times and they will never come back.