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The Internet

English Wikipedia Gets Two Millionth Article 125

Posted by kdawson from the tracking-the-milestone dept.
reybrujo writes to inform us of a milestone for the English-language Wikipedia: the posting of its two millionth article. At the time of this posting there is uncertainty over which article achieved the milestone. "Initial reports stated that the two millionth article written was El Hormiguero, which covers a Spanish TV comedy show. Later review of this information found that this article was most likely not two million, and instead a revised list of articles created around two million has been generated, and is believed to be correct to within 3 articles. The Wikimedia foundation, which operates the site, is expected to make an announcement with a final decision, which may require review of the official servers' logs."
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English Wikipedia Gets Two Millionth Article More

English Wikipedia Gets Two Millionth Article

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  • Likely a lot more than 2 million (Score:5, Informative)

    by suso ( 153703 ) * on Monday September 10, 2007 @07:59AM (#20536837) Journal
    Mediawiki doesn't count all articles in its article count. And I'm not talking about talk or image pages either. I think it has a threshold of like 72 bytes before it counts an article as an article. So they are most likely way over 2 million. For instance, Bloomingpedia actually has 2,148 articles right now but the Mediawiki count on the front page only shows 2,106. So 42 of the articles are smaller than the threshold.

    However, if they (or anyone else) need a plugin for Mediawiki that will list the pages in order so that you can count them and determine which article was the Nth article, I wrote a plugin called Page Create Order [bloomingpedia.org] that will put a special page called "List Pages By Creation Date" in your wiki. We developed it for Bloomingpedia originally. Its simple, but it does the job. It could be easily modified to only count articles that are of a certain size as well, the main purpose of this plugin is to see the order in which pages where created.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hachey ( 809077 )
      Well, there is also a couple of efforts by others right now in paging through the logs to double check for this kind of discrepancy.

      How much is 72 bytes worth of text anyhow?

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by IBBoard ( 1128019 )
        That depends on the encoding - either 72 characters in ASCII or UTF-8 or 36 characters if they go for the more multi-lingual friendly UTF-16.

        Either way, something about that length is likely to be a stub and not a 'real' article.

        • Re:Likely a lot more than 2 million (Score:5, Insightful)

          by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Monday September 10, 2007 @09:23AM (#20537449)

          That depends on the encoding - either 72 characters in ASCII or UTF-8 or 36 characters if they go for the more multi-lingual friendly UTF-16.
          UTF-16 more multi-lingual friendly than UTF-8? Er... it has many disadvantages and not a single benefit over UTF-8.

          For example, UTF-16 needs a lot of porting effort, while UTF-8 magically works in all 8-bit-clean programs that don't need to count codepoints or tell character properties (and hey, bytes happen to _be_ 8-bit wide so unless you do something strange, you are 8-bit-clean). Most English-speaking developers won't put this effort, so here goes your multi-lingual friendliness.

          Or another, more insidious flaw of UTF-16: it gives people a false feeling that they can store an entire character in a single array position. This works... as long as you don't meet any character over U+FFFF (rare Han[1], etc) or characters which need to be written using a base char + combining characters (Indic scripts, etc). UTF-8 makes no such promises, and thus doesn't lead to such non-obvious bugs.

          UTF-16 is an abomination that needs to go. Unfortunately, it's entrenched in Windows API: you need to use BlueScreenW() instead of BlueScreenA() everywhere, and this is something people who don't need internationalization don't want to do. Even as of Vista, Microsoft still doesn't allow simply setting the system's code page to UTF-8, something which the whole Unix world[2] did years ago.

          [1]. And according to People's Murderous Commiepublic of China's laws, you need to support these (as GB18030) in any product sold in mainland China. Of course, they don't give a damn about that law unless they want to demand a favour from a company so they have a yet another stick of non-compliance).

          [2]. All non-toy distros do this by default, and if not for few whiners, non-UTF8 locales would probably be dropped by now.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ajs ( 35943 )

            That depends on the encoding - either 72 characters in ASCII or UTF-8 or 36 characters if they go for the more multi-lingual friendly UTF-16.

            UTF-16 more multi-lingual friendly than UTF-8? Er... it has many disadvantages and not a single benefit over UTF-8.

            The touted benefit of UTF-16 is that for those who make almost no use of the 7-bit ascii set (the only characters that are represented by a single byte in UTF-8), it can improve the speed of reading/scanning and ultimate size of many files.

            In practice, this isn't really going to happen in most Web-based text, but for electronic versions of non-Web text, it can be a win. Overall, however, I agree with you that there's more benefit in using UTF-8 universally.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by cpeterso ( 19082 )

              The touted benefit of UTF-16 is that for those who make almost no use of the 7-bit ascii set (the only characters that are represented by a single byte in UTF-8), it can improve the speed of reading/scanning and ultimate size of many files.

              You are describing the benefits of UCS-2, which is the character encoding used by Windows NT and .NET and Java. UCS-2 characters are fixed-width, but UTF-16 characters (like UTF-8 characters) support surrogate pairs, so you never know how long a character might be without

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cpeterso ( 19082 )

            UTF-16 more multi-lingual friendly than UTF-8? Er... it has many disadvantages and not a single benefit over UTF-8.


            btw, Windows NT uses UCS-2 not UTF-16. UTF-16 has no benefit over UTF-8, but UCS-2 is convenient for string operations (since UCS-2 chars are fixed width, allowing for O(1) string indexing).

          • something which the whole Unix world[2] did years ago.

            [2]. All non-toy distros do this by default, and if not for few whiners, non-UTF8 locales would probably be dropped by now.

            Unfortunately, that isn't quite true. As far as I know, none of the BSDs use UTF8 by default. I have verified it on FreeBSD 6.2, but I cannot imagine the {Net,Open}BSD would use it either. Internationalization is definitely an area where Linux is above and ahead of BSD.

            I've heard rumors that that's one of the things being improve for FreeBSD 7.0, but I don't know just how improved it is.

      • less than a slashdot sig

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by adatepej ( 1154117 )
      There's a reason for only counting pages above a certain size as "articles": a heading and a sentence do not maketh a proper wikipedia article.

  • That was quick (Score:4, Funny)

    by micpp ( 818596 ) on Monday September 10, 2007 @08:04AM (#20536861) Homepage
    And people have already tried to delete the article for not being notable.
    • Can you be notable for being not-notable? Or famous simply for being famous? ... Before you answer "no" think of celebrities like Paris Hilton...

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by WWWWolf ( 2428 )

        Can you be notable for being not-notable? Or famous simply for being famous? ... Before you answer "no" think of celebrities like Paris Hilton...

        Basically, the situation is this: Notability has its thresholds - either you are notable or not (though where exactly to draw the line is, at times, difficult - but we have pretty clear picture by now). Articles about people, bands, groups, companies, websites, etc. have to have assertions of notability (i.e. "they're really big in Pakistan and have released three albums", or whatever). Notability has to be backed up by reliable sources.

        This leads to the situation that 1) people who are famous for faili

    • That's what the '!notable' Slashdot tag is for.

  • Confusion? (Score:2, Funny)

    by niceone ( 992278 ) *
    Can't they just check Wikipedia?

  • The millionth (Score:3, Funny)

    by 4D6963 ( 933028 ) on Monday September 10, 2007 @08:14AM (#20536903)

    Which was the millionth article then? Not that it really matters, just being curious, cause I'm like, bored..

  • Is it so important? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by El Lobo ( 994537 ) on Monday September 10, 2007 @08:14AM (#20536907)
    And why, oh why, is it always so important to know exactly which articles was Nr X, which poster was the first one, which was the first child born in the new millenium, how many times did Al pacino say "fuck" on Scarface and so on?...

    Do we have so few problems that we have the need to statistically know EVERYTHING? Does that matter (other than to inflate the vanity of a few?).

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by daeg ( 828071 )
      Just so you know, you're the 8th person bitching about this, and the 5th since the turn of the hour's 22nd minute, with a very high probability that future posters will bitch about it too, and will bitch about it at the 2.5 million mark, too, and the 5 million.
    • Because humans have an in-built obsession with patterns. It's the same as why we often see two pairs of two objects and not one group of four, or two groups of two and a single one rather than five. The human mind makes use of patterns and finds patterns in things. By knowing the Nth whatever then we get to look for patterns.

      Or something like that.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Rik Sweeney ( 471717 )
      how many times did Al pacino say "fuck" on Scarface

      It's 207 in case anyone's interested.
    • OCD
    • Exactly what I was thinking..."who gives a shit?" Is the author of the two-millionth article going to be given a cookie? Why waste time delving into logs and figuring out what exactly was the article that just happened to come after 1,999,999? Bleh.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Cctoide ( 923843 )
      Yes.

  • What I love about Wikipedia.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Demerara ( 256642 ) on Monday September 10, 2007 @08:15AM (#20536911) Homepage
    ...is their commitment to stating the obvious. At length...

    The 2,000,000 article is actually the last article to be part of the first 2,000,000 articles and the 2,000,001 is the first of the third million.

    I'm glad they cleared that up - I wondered whether the 2,000,000 article might be actually the one millionth or perhaps the 4 millionth....

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by lhuiz ( 614322 )
      Sound a bit like that almost, but not quite, entirely irrelevant discussion about whether 1 MB equals 1000 kB or 1024 kB. Anyway, what's with this obsession with the decimal system all of a sudden? Come on /.ers! Did nobody notice when wikipedia crossed the much more interesting threshold of 10^20 articles? And please let's postpone celebrations until we reach 10^21 articles...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by mdwh2 ( 535323 )
      I guess it's needed for those people who thought the new millenium started in 2000 ;)

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by fractoid ( 1076465 )
      You're saying there isn't a zeroth article?

      Oh and wow, the Firefox spell checker thinks 'zeroth' is a word. Score one for Asimov (or did he not coin it? Whoever it was then, colour me curious!)

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by everphilski ( 877346 )
        or did he not coin it? Whoever it was then, colour me curious!

        maybe a c++ programmer? :)

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by fm6 ( 162816 )
        In computing, zero has always been been a valid index, and often makes more sense as the lower bound than 1. For example, if you have a multidimensional array stored contiguously, it's easier to calculate the memory location holding a given element if the array's lower bounds are 0.

        So "zeroth" is perfectly good word, and Asimov (who really didn't understand computers all that well) probably didn't coin it.

        I once had a CS professor who insisted that his students number the sections in their papers from 0 ins

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by fm6 ( 162816 )
      Your complaint about Wikipedia is a special case of my #1 complaint about Wikipedia. Which is that its content mostly lacks focus. I write technical documents for a living, and in my job it's important to structure content carefully and only put in the facts that your readers are likely to need. (The most difficult and most enjoyable aspect of my work.) Because nobody "owns" a given article, it's impossible to impose this kind of discipline on Wikipedia. To my mind, that's the biggest drawback to editing re
  • It could have been image macros of "JUST AS PLANNED" with the caption text "2M GET" over and over again.
  • It would be interesting to know how many "real" articles there are. That is, if you took out the individual articles for all the fictional sci-fi characters that wikipedia seems to excel at, all the articles for individual episodes of Star Trek and Dr Who, basically all the meaningless cruft that nerds deem important - then, count how many articles there are. Far, FAR less than 2 million, I would expect.

    • Re:It would be interesting to know (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jollyreaper ( 513215 ) on Monday September 10, 2007 @08:38AM (#20537069)

      It would be interesting to know how many "real" articles there are. That is, if you took out the individual articles for all the fictional sci-fi characters that wikipedia seems to excel at, all the articles for individual episodes of Star Trek and Dr Who, basically all the meaningless cruft that nerds deem important - then, count how many articles there are. Far, FAR less than 2 million, I would expect.
      I would agree that there's no place for that sort of thing in a paper encyclopedia, there's just not enough room. If you want geek stuff, you have to buy those books separately. But wiki has no practical limitation, it can grow to be however big it needs to. So long as the information is well-written, what does it matter? The important matter is indexing the information. Without a good index, I could certainly see your point, the practical information could be lost amongst the impractical. But wiki has a good manual index and google automatically indexes the shit out of the site. So what's the rub?

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by opusman ( 33143 )
        The rub is that Wikipedia presents itself as a "real" encyclopedia, when it clearly isn't. If they didn't make such an issue out of the whole "notability" thing it wouldn't be so bad - as it is, it really looks like hypocrisy. I've got nothing against having all those articles up there - I've read a few of them myself. But wikipedia is presented to the world as a real encyclopedia, with high standards to match (e.g. the "accuracy competition" with Britannica) - and yet the vast majority of its material does

        • The rub is that Wikipedia presents itself as a "real" encyclopedia, when it clearly isn't. If they didn't make such an issue out of the whole "notability" thing it wouldn't be so bad - as it is, it really looks like hypocrisy. I've got nothing against having all those articles up there - I've read a few of them myself. But wikipedia is presented to the world as a real encyclopedia, with high standards to match (e.g. the "accuracy competition" with Britannica) - and yet the vast majority of its material does not relate to anything real or important by any stretch of the (non-geek) imagination. When 50% of Britannica is composed of biographies of Captain Janeway and Buffy Summers then Wikipedia will be able to count itself as a real encylopedia, but not before.

          Fair enough. But we could put this to the test. Has anybody done a survey to find out how the wiki articles break down by topic? My guess would be that even if the cruft were the majority of the articles, wiki is so large that it would still have britannica beat in sheer volume in the serious categories.

        • Re:It would be interesting to know (Score:5, Insightful)

          by JesseMcDonald ( 536341 ) on Monday September 10, 2007 @09:35AM (#20537581) Homepage

          It seems to me (and apparently the GP as well) that you're criticizing Wikipedia for not having the same limitations as a paper encylopedia. Who cares what proportion of the articles fall into some niche category, as long as one can still easily find all the information one is looking for? The simple fact that a physical encyclopedia has limited storage space and thus cannot contain in-depth articles on every little special-interest detail does not appear to me to somehow constitute an advantage for physical encyclopedias.

          Or were you perhaps simply protesting the direct comparison of article counts between Wikipedia and Britannica? That I could understand, since the comparison could hardly be fair. Their requirements are simply too different for any direct quantitative comparison to be meaningful.

          • I would like to put the people who claim that Wikipedia is evil for not deleting any "cruft" article immediately and the people who claim that Wikipedia is evil for deleting anything whatsoever(specifically webcomics) in a cage and let them duke it out.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Gaffod ( 939100 )
            I think you misrepresent his argument. While it certainly is not a bad thing that Wikipedia has many trivia artcles of dubious importance, compare:

            Wikipedia now has 136,000 articles on comic book and sci-fi characters, as opposed to last year's 86,000!
            Wikipedia now has 347,000 articles on natural science and math, as opposed to last year's 297,000!

            Now, no offense to the comic book crowd but I simply don't give a rat's ass about how many articles on obscure trivia there are, or by how much they've increased
        • No. As long as the stuff Britannica does include is correctly done in Wikipedia, which it is, the existence and proportions of "cruft" are irrelevant.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by dbolger ( 161340 )
      You are being a bit closed minded there. What gives you the right to determine what is "real" or "important"? I'm not saying I entirely disagree with your view on the value of such things, but your argument could really be turned on its head for any point of view. Replace the Slashdot POV with Entertainment Weekly and we get something that is just as valid as your argument:

      'It would be interesting to know how many "real" articles there are. That is, if you took out the individual articles for all the boring
      • You are being a bit closed minded there. What gives you the right to determine what is "real" or "important"?

        Sadly I've seen too many very useful Wikipedia articles being deleted over the years. There seem to be a number of Wikipedia people setting the bar too high for stuff like notability. Wikipedia isn't a paper encyclopedia, we don't need to restrict the content by size.

        The most recent example I've seen was the CallWeaver article - now CallWeaver (which is quite a big Free software project) has no Wik

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by emh203 ( 815620 )
        Yes, because articles about the Borg and Species 8427 provide a real contribution to human progress and knowledge.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by mdwh2 ( 535323 )
      I think it's clear that the vast majority of 2 million articles are going to be cruft/meaningless/niche articles - that's going to be true in any encyclopedia, because I doubt you could come up with 2 million notable "meaningful" topics (although as an aside, I do sometimes find episode articles useful or vaguely interesting, I can't be the only one).

      Also I'm not sure the divide is whether it's fiction or not - I would expect there to be articles on subjects such as Star Trek (not necessarily every episode)
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Cctoide ( 923843 )
        Because those The Internets Is Serious Business people deem it so, and you must comply or be classified as "a nerd" and "non-notable". Plus, it would not contribute "to the advancement of human progress(???) and knowledge", even though you could cram another fifty million articles in there and still contribute to human knowledge all you want.

        That, and because the people who had a bad experience with Wikipedia were feeling bad today.
    • The editors of wikipedia determine this.

      The current consensus says it is right to create a page about a fiction person in a sf serie, but a page about a real person needs a lot more noticeably to be not deleted on the fast track list.

      If you think it is right to place a external link. Think again. wikithink will most likely remove it.

    • What is unreal about an article about an episode of Star Trek? If people use it then it is "real", the fact that it would not appear in a printed encyclopaedia is irrelevant, Wikipedia is not a printed encyclopaedia!

      Irrelevant articles tend to get either improved or deleted so the majority of the 2 million articles are almost certainly *used* (the count does not include tiny stub articles, redirects etc...). You have obviously never tried to create an article on Wikipedia or you would know that vanity, fan

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by simong ( 32944 )
      The great thing about Wikipedia is that it can include articles on Palestine and minor characters in Buffy. A print encyclopedia is limited by its resources and has to be relevant. Wikipedia is in a constant state of revision so it is always relevant. Or irrelevant, depending on how you look at it. It's not exactly a huge draw on resources either - the text only amounts to 5gb or so. I probably wouldn't use it as a primary source but it's a good kickoff point.
    • It's really not just nerd stuff, most popular tv shows have episode descriptions. While that information is useful, I don't really consider it encyclopedic, and would like to see them moved to individual wikias.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Carnildo ( 712617 )
      By your definition, Wikipedia has somewhere between 1,500,000 articles (discarding *all* articles about popular culture) and 1,900,000 articles (discarding just the things you consider "cruft"). The largest group of articles are biographies (30% of the encyclopedia), followed by articles on places (25%), popular culture (25%), and history (10%).
    • On a bad day of revision wars and trolling, probably fifty or sixty "real" articles exist on Wacky-pedia. The rest are collections of somewhat-related material cobbled together at random, mixed with extremely detailed minute-by-minute breakdowns of obscure SciFi series episodes and entries about imaginary languages.

  • Spanglish Wiki? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mr. Underbridge ( 666784 ) on Monday September 10, 2007 @08:25AM (#20536969)

    "...a milestone for the English-language Wikipedia:" ..."Initial reports stated that the two millionth article written was El Hormiguero, which covers a Spanish TV comedy show."

    Wow, that's ironical.

  • How many articles do other encyclopedias have? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Refried Beans ( 70083 ) on Monday September 10, 2007 @09:09AM (#20537323) Homepage
    Two million does sound impressive. Congratulations, Wikipedia. But how does this compare to other encyclopedias? Does anyone have numbers for Britannica or World Book?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by LiquidCoooled ( 634315 )
      Actually, wikipedia can answer that (though I don't know how accurate it is):

      The size of the Britannica has remained roughly constant over the past 70 years, with about 40 million words on half a million topics.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Bri tannica [wikipedia.org]
    • Two million does sound impressive. Congratulations, Wikipedia. But how does this compare to other encyclopedias? Does anyone have numbers for Britannica or World Book?

      Wikipedia does [wikipedia.org], of course. It turns out some of the largest encyclopedia's written were in Chinese, and that brings in a number of complexities in determining which is larger/est. Of course if you look at all languages of Wikipedia, it's over 8 million now [wikimedia.org], but that is mostly repeats.
  • Of course, the results will be edited to show that the 2,000,000th article is on Steven Colber's continuing humanitarian work to deal with the perpetual threat of BEARS!

  • and then of course (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sdedeo ( 683762 ) on Monday September 10, 2007 @09:12AM (#20537349) Homepage Journal
    Nominated for deletion [wikipedia.org], amusingly enough.

    It was "speedy kept", but amusing that a stratified sample [wikipedia.org] shows not only that wikipedia is filling these days with trivia, but also bureaucracy.

    (Yes, I have a bee in my bonnet about wikipedia even though I love it -- see my sig.)

  • You can help review new articles (Score:3, Informative)

    by ajs ( 35943 ) <{ajs} {at} {ajs.com}> on Monday September 10, 2007 @11:02AM (#20538927) Homepage Journal
    If you would like to help review newly created articles, just follow this URL:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Newpages [wikipedia.org]

    This will take you to the list of the most recently created articles. If you find that you have trouble keeping up with other editors who are reviewing the same articles, you might find this link useful:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Newpages&limit=250&offset=250&namespace=0 [wikipedia.org]

    Which will take you to the same list, but starting from the 250th most recent article.

    Typically, it's most useful to

    Anyone can do these things, and you can also just improve on any article by adding additional sources, or expanding on the article.

  • Yeah, but hasn't Wikipedia jumped the shark? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Medievalist ( 16032 ) on Monday September 10, 2007 @12:08PM (#20540087)
    I know a few retired rocket scientists. I'd love it if their unique knowledge didn't go to the grave with them. I'd rather be able to look up the definition of a "yardley" as a unit of pressure than a list of characters from Harry Potter. Unfortunately, wikipedia doesn't seem to be interested in anything that's "from personal knowledge or experience" these days. [wikipedia.org]

    If wikipedia is only going to allowed references to things already published elsewhere, and all written culture is inevitably moving online, how will wikipedia differentiate from Google? I mean, if there's no unique information in wikipedia, there's very little unique value in it. It's just a really labor-intensive presentation layer at that point, isn't it?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by stopbit ( 444789 )
      Wikipedia...the walmart of online information.

    • Re:Yeah, but hasn't Wikipedia jumped the shark? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Taxman415a ( 863020 ) on Monday September 10, 2007 @01:09PM (#20541029) Homepage Journal
      Wikipedia has never been interested in unique information. One of the first policies was the one against original research [wikipedia.org]. That certainly doesn't mean there isn't a place for original research, (those are plentiful), nor does it mean Wikipedia isn't valuable. By collating and linking vast amounts of information, Wikipedia does something google can't. It creates the presentation of the information manually. Google can only index content that is already there through an algorithm. And for a long time if not forever, there will be information that is not online. Further, Wikipedia summarizes information like Google will likely never be able to. Even if a Wikipedia article is not all right, it can give you an idea of where to go look and what to look for, which is perhaps it's only truly valuable contribution until there is a way to formally peer review and freeze content so that the reader can see a version that is stabilized.
      • I understand that wikipedia is an inappropriate place for publishing research. I never mentioned research. Knowledge is not research.

        By collating and linking vast amounts of information, Wikipedia does something google can't. It creates the presentation of the information manually.

        So... like dmoz. A manual presentation layer. I'm content-driven, personally, a slick presentation does not increase my perception of the value of information.

        Google can only index content that is already there through an algorithm.

        Right, so it's an automatic (and thus more up-to-date) presentation layer, which carries quantifiable and repeatable bias by virtue of being algorithmic.

        And for a long time if not forever, there will be information that is not online.

        And increasingly, if your information source is not on-line,

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Taxman415a ( 863020 )
          Well original research just happens to be the name of the policy, but it covers all unpublished ideas and thought. And what I was saying is that Wikipedia intentionally avoids that type of thing as a necessary evil to maintain improvement in quality. Otherwise you either need a power structure that can say yeah or nay on content or you open floodgates to all the latest crackpot theories and information.You have to spend enough time on the project to reallize there isn't an in between. And again, it's not li

    • I know a few retired rocket scientists. I'd love it if their unique knowledge didn't go to the grave with them. I'd rather be able to look up the definition of a "yardley" as a unit of pressure than a list of characters from Harry Potter. Unfortunately, wikipedia doesn't seem to be interested in anything that's "from personal knowledge or experience" these days. [wikipedia.org]

      Because Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not an original publication. I agree that this kind of knowledge should be archived and documented, but there are better places for it.

      For example, there's a wikibooks page. You could try building an open textbook on rocket science. There's wikia [wikia.com] where you could build a rocket science Wiki. These are mostly pop-culture or community based wikis, but you could make a serious special interest wiki, with original content, if you wish.

      Then you could link to i

      • ...Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not an original publication.

        Huh? The other encyclopedias are original publications. The articles I wrote in the distant past for Wikipedia were all original text from my brain... mostly from personal knowledge, with no cites at all. Some of those articles are huge now, and certainly most are far better than they were when I originally wrote them, but I think none would be unchallenged today.

        Thank you for the wikibooks reference and wikia link, incidentally. Wasn't aware of those.

  • Given the number, speed, and voracity of deletions on WP, this is probably more like the 3 millionth article, if you include all articles ever created.

    By some time next month I expect the 2Mth article will be more like the 1,990Kth.
  • Slashdot gets Two Millionth *Pointless* Article... ...more to come.
  • Good for them. That means that more profit and web traffic for Wikia, Jimbo Wale's for-profit spin-off of Wikipedia. Did you know that Wikipedia blocks *ALL* search engine spider follow-through for all outbound links from Wikipedia...

    ...but allows them through for Wikia, the for-profit firm that Wales owns?

    More details of this fiscal conflict of interest, that pads Wikia's pockets with each public relations brouhaha like this:

    http://wikipediareview.com/blog/category/wikia/ [wikipediareview.com]

  • I hate to be a naysayer, but in what way is the 2000000th article a meaningful thing? We could also assign special value to the 1234567th article, or the 1111111th article, or the 1483725th article; it's just a number. How is the fact that it has several zero's in its base-ten representation at all significant?

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