Wikipedia:Wikipedia Day
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- See also Wikipedia:Wikiday
January 15 is known as Wikipedia Day to Wikipedians. On this date in the year 2001, the wiki-based Wikipedia project went public after spending five days on Nupedia (see Project beginnings).
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[edit] Wikipedia Day 2007
On January 15, 2007, Wikipedia turned six-years-old. According to special:statistics, the English language Wikipedia has around 1,500,000 articles and Wikipedians have made 104,000,000 edits. The millionth article was Jordanhill railway station, created on March 1 2006.
Wikipedia.org has moved from an Alexa rank of 20 to a rank of 11 (3-month average) having already briefly visited rank 8 (current rank). At the news of wikipedia.org hitting the top 10, our beloved developers screamed "INCOMING!!!" and dove for cover. But they've been doing that every day since 2004.
[edit] Wikipedia Day 2006
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, turned 5 years old January 15, 2006.
As of January 15, the English Wikipedia alone had more than 920,000 articles, with over 340,000,000 words. The millionth article is expected to appear in late February or early March. The combined Wikipedias for all languages have an estimated total of over 3,100,000 articles in some two hundred languages. Eighty-four of the non-English Wikipedias have over 1,000 articles, thirty-six have over 10,000 and seven have over 100,000.
For a few days now, Wikipedia has been listed on Alexa as the 20th most popular website in the world (one week average). The current trend should see it entering the top ten this year.
129 new servers were purchased during 2005, bringing the total to 171.[1] The Wikimedia cluster has had to be moved to another facility (also in Tampa, Florida) to obtain more space. Wikimedia now has three auxiliary server clusters, in Paris, Amsterdam and Seoul.
This year, Wikipedia has been criticized for the Seigenthaler controversy, but it was also reviewed in Nature, which found articles on scientific subjects to be comparable in accuracy to Encyclopedia Britannica. New tools were adopted to make it easier to prevent vandalism and reference sources in articles. In 2006, Wikipedia will work on pushing to 1.0 for a large number of articles.
[edit] Wikipedia Day 2005
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, turned 4 years old January 15, 2005.
The English Wikipedia now has more than 450,000 articles, and bets will soon close on when the millionth English article will be reached (Wikipedia:Million pool). Fifty-four of the non-English Wikipedias have over 1,000 articles.
On 29 December 2004, for the first time, Wikipedia was listed on Alexa's list of the top 100 English-language web sites, at #99. On Wikipedia Day 2005, it was listed at rank 87.
[edit] Wikipedia Day 2004
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, turned 3 years old January 15, 2004.
The English Wikipedia alone now has more than 190,000 articles, and the combined Wikipedias for other languages now exceed the English Wikipedia in size, giving an estimated total of over 420,000 articles in over 40 languages. [2] The English Wikipedia alone now contains over 56 million words, making it comparable in size with the largest previously existing encyclopedias.
18 of the non-English Wikipedias now have over 1000 articles, which seems to be the "lift-off" point for rapid growth, and non-English growth is expected to accelerate rapidly. A significant factor in aiding the growth of these Wikipedias is that they have almost without exception migrated to use the MediaWiki software. A further conversion challenge still awaits progression in 2004 towards using UTF-8 on all Wikipedias, allowing greater ease of use in articles including multilingual text.
Overall article growth continues to increase exponentially, but at a rate less than we estimated last year at this time (we originally estimated in 2001 that it would take 5 or more years to reach our first 100,000 articles in English). This analysis suggests that the "organic" hand-edited growth rate of a mature Wikipedia is slightly less than doubling growth per year, with younger Wikipedias growing somewhat faster.
This growth has not been at the expense of quality, as the level of polish and breadth of expertise has continued to grow throughout the Wikipedias. Further software features, such as new automated category indexes, are being developed to allow Wikipedia to scale with this massive growth in content and traffic.
The creation of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation has provided an independent legal foundation for Wikipedia, and has allowed Wikipedia to spin off a number of sister projects, including Wiktionary, Wikiquote and Wikibooks.
As the number of articles has increased, so has the amount of traffic from readers, to the point where the servers have begun to struggle to keep up in the face of recent hardware failures. In response to this, a fundraising drive brought in sufficient donations to allow the parts for a new scalable and fault-tolerant server farm to be ordered. The new server farm is anticipated to return Wikipedia to being fast and responsive, and to be able to continue to keep up with the growth in load over the next year.
Along with fundraising, Wikipedia is also experimenting with innovations in its self-governance.
[edit] Wikipedia Day 2003
With over 130,000 articles spread across 28 languages, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, turned 2 years old January 15, 2003. Several Wikipedia contributors (Wikipedians), in the collaborative spirit which has brought us so far, have redesigned the Main Page of the English Wikipedia in celebration of Wikipedia's birthday.
During the first year of its existence, Wikipedia went from zero to 20,000 articles in the English version and that was considered to be an impressive growth rate. The second year of Wikipedia saw the addition of nearly 80,000 more articles in the English version alone, making it the world's largest Wiki and the world's largest free content encyclopedia. With edits being made 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by hundreds of bright and enthusiastic volunteers from around the world, who knows where we will be one year from today?
Wikipedia's original goal was to make 100,000, and at the time we speculated that this might take us five or more years. It is now known that the 100,000 article milestone is just the tip of the iceberg. The power of the collaborative WikiWiki editing model, the freedom that the GNU Free Documentation License gives users, and Wikipedia's strong nonbias policy (the neutral point of view), combined with our goal of creating the world's largest encyclopedia will ensure the continued growth and success of our project.
Many people have told Wikipedians that they would fail. "What?" they said, "You let anyone edit anytime they wish? It is preposterous to think that anything of any value could be created that way. You are destined to fail!" It is, however, becoming more and more apparent with each passing day that they are wrong. Wikipedia celebrates Wikipedia Day by continuing to build the world's best encyclopedia where everyone can contribute!!!
[edit] Wikipedia Day 2002
On Wikipedia Day 2002 this article was created. You can see an early version of it here. We had roughly 20,000 articles then. You can see what Wikipedia looked like around that time at http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/
For even earlier than that, you can find copies in the Internet Archive. Here is the oldest one archived: February 28, 2001.
[edit] Wikipedia Day 2001
On this day, Wikipedia was publicly launched.
