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."
It's come a long way (Score:1, Interesting)
Wow. Maybe I'm getting old, but I remember when "Wikipedia" was James Wales's Geocities page where he exhaustively listed his favorite episodes of The Simpsons. Then he wanted his friends to be able to contribute their knowledge, but Geocities did not allow CGI scripts. So with a generous grant from the National Endowment for Democracy and the Carnegie institute for International Peace, he started "Wikki-Web," a fan-site for FOX network cartoons. The scope later broadened to topics as diverse as astrophysics and science dogs, and the name changed to "WIKIPEDIA." The rest, as they say, was history...
Re:Let me defend the Wikipedia here (Score:5, Interesting)
On wikipedia, the same basic thing would apply. If you wander into a low interest/low traffic area, you'd have a little notice at the top of the page, telling you that this is a minimally trafficked article, and anybody could have scrawled anything on it, and nobody would notice.
With storage costs(particularly for minimally formatted text) so damn low, you don't save much by deleting(and you potentially lose something by doing so) which makes some means of organization that allows a compromise much more attractive.
Re:Let me defend the Wikipedia here (Score:3, Interesting)
That excuse was invalid when it was first asserted, and is equally invalid today. The claim is that at 1million articles, Wikipedia was at the bursting point, and deletion was necessary to keep spam and abuse at bay. Now the claim is that at 3mil, WP is at the bursting point, and deletion is necessary to keep spam and abuse at bay. Guess what, neither was true.
Wikipedia could allow articles about everything anyone ever cared about in a reasonable way, without any loss of quality overall if it started from the premise that every possible string of letters on length n or less (where n is the maximum allowed length in MediaWiki) is a valid article. It just requires a tiered system of article management. I don't think that an article about Simpson characters' nose lengths should show up in initial search results. However, I don't understand the seemingly "natural" desire to exclude such an article from an online database of the collected knowledge of mankind. How is a censored list of articles ever to be exhaustive? Is it somehow more comprehensive because it's censored based on popular consensus rather than societal taboos? I don't think so.
Re:And that's... (Score:3, Interesting)
When you have some time to kill, just keep clicking the "Random Article" link. By gum lad, there's some shite on that there Wikipedia.
First random article: Thomas Fitzherbert [wikipedia.org], an English Jesuit. Born in the 16th century, lived to be 88 years old. That's pretty impressive for those days.
Second random article: Chhota Saula [wikipedia.org], a village in Bangladesh.
Third random article: Some mafia dude named James Emma [wikipedia.org]. How do you shake someone down for protection money with a name like Emma???
Fourth random article: Shri Devi [wikipedia.org], navigation page for a Hindi and Buddhist deity.
Fifth random article: Dan Nicolae Potra [wikipedia.org], some Romanian gymnast dude.
And my attempt at a sixth one timed out. Guess Wikipedia is bogging down today. Kind of surprised I didn't get any garbage to be honest with you. Maybe the pseudorandom number generator gods are smiling upon me today?
I edited once, my own village's page FFS, some of the dross on there was laughable, and obviously cribbed from some online tourist agency. After I corrected some blatant rubbish, some uber-tosser later reverted the edits, because apparently it was not a "NPOV".
I edited the homepage for my city with a population of "50,000" to include information above and beyond the generic census data that every township as and they were reverted as not being "noteworthy". Gotta love it! On the flip side, if I ever need a summary of every single Babylon 5 episode, I know where to go.....
Re:And that's... (Score:5, Interesting)
I had the same experience trying to add up to date informaton in 2006. I needed cataract surgery, so the first place I went to satisfy my curiosity about it was wikipedia. My surgeon had told me about a new type of implant, an accomodating (ficusing) lens which wasn't mentioned in the article. I think my edits were erased in onl;y a few hours; they didn't even bother doing a google search. I tried to update it several time, without success. I stopped editing wikipedia then; it's a futile effort.
Interestingly, I mentioned that in a slashdot comment, and the accomodating IOL was added that day, and stayed.
Re:And that's... (Score:2, Interesting)
So here's to the three millionth stub - congratulations, everybody! Somebody let me know when Wikipedia takes 'notability' seriously.
A Pause for Pidgey. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've mentioned the sad case of Pidgey before, but considering this milestone, I think it's worth bringing it up again.
Pidgey is a Pokemon. In February 2007, Pidgey had his own page [wikipedia.org] at Wikipedia. You could go there and see a small template(since deleted [wikipedia.org]) explaining to you what Pidgey is and various other pieces of information about him. It was objectively a useful resource.
Pidgey no longer has a page. Pidgey has a paragraph [wikipedia.org]. A tragically short and dry affair devoid of even the most basic image. One can learn very little about Pidgey from reading it. And why is this? Why must Pidgey be so excised from the the site? Because he is a Pokemon? Does being a cartoon character or a children's toy or anything else automatically make something unworthy of a few kilobytes of page space on the the supposed repository of all the world's knowledge. The sad fact is that answer to that question is a resounding YES.
"A page for every Pokemon" was once used as a derogatory remark about Wikipedia. Evidently, enough faceless wikicrats took exception to this and decided to purge all mention of Pidgey and all the rest of the Pokemon, beyond the barest minimum of exposure, to make sure Wikipedia was regarded as a "professional" and "encyclopedic" resource. Pidgey and the Pokemon, and countless others have been subjected to the digital equivalent of a book burning by people who held an opinion that certain information was not "worthy" of archival. This from the same crowd of people who think that the Cloud Gate [wikipedia.org], Wood Badges [wikipedia.org], Ima Hogg [wikipedia.org] and Books on the psychology of Est [wikipedia.org] are all topics worthy enough to be Featured Articles [wikipedia.org]. Compared to such worthies, perhaps Pidgey, merely part of a 5 billion dollar franchise [american.edu], does fall a little short. But as short as all that?
Technology is improving, access to knowledge and the cost of providing it are plummeting; Yet Wikipedia's growth is slowing [slashdot.org]. Pidgey is merely a symptom of the underlying decay present in the online encyclopedia. His purge was less about practicalities than it was about running Wikipedia in a way at odds with it ostensibly free, open and inclusive nature. His fate was the result of all information on Wikipedia that falls under the baleful eyes of those editors with opinions and the power to exercise them.
Pidgey's was not the first page to be purged from Wikipedia, nor the most important. But it will not be the last, or the smallest.
Re:And then it was proptly deleted (Score:2, Interesting)
I totally agree.
I personally would also like to separate out all the entries regarding contemporary entertainment (movie makers, actors, actresses, pop music, cartoons/anime, video games), from things of real concerns... but that is of secondary importance.
The fictional stuffs which currently plagues Wiki, however, is a real threat, because it makes pseudo-achievement looks equal to real achievement. Actually doing science is much harder, and much less glamorous than making a sci-fi movie. If both are given equal honor I think people will become less and less prone to doing the former.
Or maybe I worry too much...
Re:And then it was proptly deleted (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah, I'd like to see an Elvish wikipedia ;-) That would be cool...
Re:Ebonics, etc (Score:5, Interesting)
True, but I would argue that Ebonics is a more valid and complete language/dialect, being that it arose naturally.
I guess it's nonsense to call anything spoken by real people invalid or incomplete, but Tolkien was just crazy about languages. He spoke many, knew more and was highly interested in their structure. He just as much created the books around the language as the other way around, at least Sindarin for the elves. What he created is probably as natural as any real language, perhaps even more since it's shaped around one man's linguistic vision and not centuries of collected oddities that crop up.