Wikipedia talk:Milestones

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[edit] 100,000 talk

How often is the counter updated? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 80.141.122.252 (talk • contribs) 11:02, 19 January 2003(UTC).

The counter was started on July 20, 2002. --mav —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Maveric149 (talk • contribs) 11:10, 19 January 2003 (UTC).

I bet, Tuesday will be the day. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 80.141.106.226 (talk • contribs) 09:55, 18 January 2003 (UTC).


100 articles left, you could be right

Ok, I bet the 100,000th article will be 1952 in science fiction :) -- Merphant 10:11 Jan 18, 2003 (UTC)


I'm pretty sure that the article on Louis Theroux was number 100,000, just beating my old hometown of Hastings, New Zealand. Lisiate 03:58 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)

No, no, no, I think your one just about beat mine! I think I got the 99,999th and 100,001st articles, though. :) -- Oliver PEREIRA 04:10 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)

Are you sure it wasn't demarchy? Main page says 100063 articles right now, and Special:Newpages says that the 64th-newest article is demarchy. -- Merphant 12:35 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)

But does each one of those new pages have a comma in them? If they don't, then they are not counted as articles. --mav 19:11 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)

That's odd, as I checked the Main Page article count after Oliver and I did our simulpost and it was definately over 100,000. Perhaps there have been some page deletions since then. WHo can give us a definative answer? Lisiate

We can just estimate so give a list of articles created round the 100,000th one-fonzy

I'm sure the counter changed when I deleted some of the bogus Star Wars entries people created. Koyaanis Qatsi

[edit] 200,000 talk

(originally at Wikipedia:Celebrating 200,000) And the prize for the 200,000th article on the English language Wikipedia goes to:

00:42, Feb 2, 2004 Neil Warnock (196 bytes) . . User:SimonMayer

Congratulations to all Wikipedians. Today is a great day.

  • In the true spirit of Wikipedia, I'd help Wikipedia by expanding it, but I don't know anything about football. fabiform | talk 02:06, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

congrats! (and lets go on to 250,000...) TeunSpaans

Talk about shooting low. According to Modeling wikipedia's growth link, that should happen in June, 2004 ;) →Raul654 02:39, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)
The index of the print version of Encyclopedia Brittannica contains approximately 750,000 entries, if I remember correctly. That's about four times our present article count. How about that as a short-term goal? -- Seth Ilys 02:48, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
If that is the case, we'd better rise more money to buy servers. -- Taku 02:58, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)
That number seems high - 750,000. The whole set of print encyclopedias only has 65,000 entries, according to [1] Fuzheado 04:26, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Not right. The 2004 Encyclopedia Britannica has 65,000 articles. It may still very well have 750,000 entries in its index. --mav
I understand the distinction. I should have said 65,000 "articles" but didn't since Britannica calls them entries, not articles. Nevertheless, 750,000 "index entries" doesn't seem in sync with 65,000 articles. I'm no data mining expert, so I'd like to see a source for the "750,000." Fuzheado 05:05, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Just looked in one of my textbooks (Introduction to Reference Work, Katz, v. 1, p. 227) where I was recalling the stat from. Accoring to its comparison table for major encyclopeias; the 2000 print Brittannica has 790,000 index entries (I was off by 40,000). The largest article count it lists is the 2000 online Britannica at 83k. I assume those stats came (originally) from the publisher. Most of the index items listed in Britannica don't have dedicated entries of their own; they're people or places or concepts that might get one or two mentions in some other 500-1000 word article essay. We can create dedicated entries for each of those that aren't subordinate to any other topic or article. I felt it might be a useful comparison point, one it looks like we might reach (at present growth rates) in about two years (at about five years from Wikipedia's birth). -- Seth Ilys 07:57, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Thanks for the info. Yes, it would be interesting to try creating an automated index, but I suspect that Google and a search engine obviates the need for actually creating an exhaustive alphabetical list. It would be interesting nonetheless. -- Fuzheado 08:01, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Getting the word out

Ok, question - has anyone outside of wikipedia actually noticed? I added a couple geek friendly Featured articles to the main page in anticipation of a slashdotting (for the record, my submission was shot down in 2 minutes flat). →Raul654 08:04, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)

Please don't - that would kill the second hand server that we are now using. Things are slow enough as it is. We should concentrate on the project-wide 500,000 press release instead. By the time we hit that milestone, the new server farm should be up and running. --mav 08:08, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
OK, keep slashdot out. For the benefit of the lazy, [here are the stats for the combined wikipedia projects. We're at 300,000 combined. Which means we're still looking at years before we hit a half-mill. →Raul654 08:19, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)
No, those stats are old. (September 2003). IIRC we are closer to 420k total articles at the moment. - snoyes 08:26, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
And given en and non-en hit 150,000 at virtually the same time, it looks like non-en has been growing (in terms of article count) 40% quicker than en over the last four months. This is great news in terms of our goal to be truly global and multi-lingual. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 10:12, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Wow! Check the sums at Wikipedia:Multilingual_statistics#pl-zh. According to that we have added ~40,000 articles since New Years Day. As of Feb 1 we have 460,855. --mav

That makes the big half million be set to arrive by the end of the month, or even sooner if the extra servers go live smoothly. Looks like the announcement and the server go live are going to have to be carefully managed after all - originally people thought they wouldn't overlap. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 12:14, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I estimate 2 weeks. --mav

YEAH! ^^ -- Schnee 18:39, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Slashdot

Well, we're getting slashdotted now :) →Raul654 21:55, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)

According to Alexa, wikipedia's traffic has recently grown to the point where its popularity (in terms of daily traffic) is similar to Slashdot's. See the Alexa comparison of Slashdot and Wikipedia. Which explains why Wikipedia needs beefier servers. -- Dwheeler 23:57, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

That's only because most Slashdot users are on Linux, which doesn't have the Alexa spyware. LDan 01:57, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Actually, last I heard, Windows was the most common OS to access slashdot. It's claimed that that is because most people check from work, but there's no evidence (besides anecdotal) to back that up. →Raul654 02:20, Feb 3, 2004 (UTC)

Here is a link to the slashdot article: link. Hope I get modded +5 Informative! Goodralph 01:12, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I award you 5 wikipedia mod points →Raul654 09:05, Feb 3, 2004 (UTC)

Yea, I notice a lot of wiki readers posting there. I saw LordKenneth trolling as well. →Raul654 01:40, Feb 3, 2004 (UTC)

I didn't realize having an opinion was trolling. - Lord Kenneth 02:54, Mar 12, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Britannica's Index

So, is it decided that Britannica's index, while having 750,000 references, are mostly just redirects to one or two words in adjacently related articles? →Raul654 10:44, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Size comparisons. Britannica has about 80,000 articles and so about 670,000 redirects. They do more combining into single long articles than we do - even in digital editions. Note we have 56,000,000 words on en as of this month - Britannica has 55,000,000. At this moment in time we are winning in terms of breadth and freeness and they are !IMO! ahead in depth (virtually all areas), consistenty of depth across subject areas, quality of writing and copyediting, illustrations, sensible linking and systematic consistent layout. Obviously we will soon blow them away in terms of size, but importantly I think the quality gap is coming down all the time, and could quite possibly disappear entirely within %SOME_PERIOD_OF_TIME_I_DON'T_DARE_GUESS_AT. User:Pcb21
Wow - I didn't realize in terms of word for word comparisons it was that close. On the issue of depth, I tend to think we are better (breadth and depth-wise) at more technical articles (esp. anything nerd related - grin) than Britannica. Also, as far as pictures go, I think we're going to start blowing them away soon - Wikipedia is basically a giant vacuum for public domain pictures. →Raul654 11:45, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)