Wikipedia publishes 500,000 articles in 50 languages
From: Frederick Noronha (FN) (fred_at_bytesforall.org)
Date: 03/02/04
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Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 15:26:07 CST
For a journo like me, this is a great extension of 'free software'
thinking into other fields of knowledge and information. FN
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Wikipedia publishes 500,000 articles in 50 languages
February 25, 2004 (The Internet): Wikipedia (Wikipedia.org
(http://en.wikipedia.org)), a volunteer-created, multi-language
encyclopedia, announced today that the project has reached a milestone
of 500,000 articles, spread across 50 different languages.
More than 300,000 new articles were created in the last 12 months alone,
making Wikipedia the world's largest and fastest-growing open content
encyclopedia. Every day, another two thousand articles are added to this
collaborative endeavour. All articles on Wikipedia can be edited and
improved by anyone at any time. The English-language Wikipedia has also
revamped the design of its front page and created a community portal to
welcome new editors.
Presently, the greatest increase in growth is in the non-English
editions, demonstrating the increasingly multilingual nature of the
undertaking. In fact, there are now more articles in other languages
combined than there are in English. Ten Wikipedia versions now have over
10,000 articles each (rounded to the nearest thousand):
* English (http://en.wikipedia.org) (213,000)
* German (http://de.wikipedia.org) (54,000)
* Japanese (http://ja.wikipedia.org) (32,000)
* French (http://fr.wikipedia.org) (28,000)
* Polish (http://pl.wikipedia.org) (24,000)
* Swedish (http://sv.wikipedia.org) (22,000)
* Dutch (http://nl.wikipedia.org) (21,000)
* Spanish (http://es.wikipedia.org) (18,000)
* Danish (http://da.wikipedia.org) (16,000)
* Esperanto (http://eo.wikipedia.org) (11,000)
An additional eighteen have more than 1,000 articles (rounded to the
nearest hundred):
* Italian (http://it.wikipedia.org/) (6,400)
* Catalan (http://ca.wikipedia.org/) (5,400)
* Chinese (http://zh.wikipedia.org/) (5,000)
* Hebrew (http://he.wikipedia.org/) (4,700)
* Romanian (http://ro.wikipedia.org/) (4,600)
* Slovenian (http://sl.wikipedia.org/) (3,900)
* Finnish (http://fi.wikipedia.org/) (3,700)
* Croatian (http://hr.wikipedia.org/) (3,100)
* Estonian (http://et.wikipedia.org/) (2,800)
* Interlingua (http://ia.wikipedia.org/) (2,600)
* Norwegian (http://no.wikipedia.org/) (2,500)
* Afrikaans (http://af.wikipedia.org/) (2,100)
* Portuguese (http://pt.wikipedia.org/) (2,000)
* Latin (http://la.wikipedia.org/) (1,900)
* Russian (http://ru.wikipedia.org/) (1,600)
* Walloon (http://wikipedia.walon.org/) (1,300)
* Czech (http://cs.wikipedia.org/) (1,200)
* Malay (http://ms.wikipedia.org/) (1,100)
This surge in growth has, according to Alexa.com (http://www.alexa.com),
resulted in Wikipedia.org surpassing Britannica.com, Infoplease.com and
Encyclopedia.com in terms of its Internet traffic rank and has placed
Wikipedia.org firmly within the top 1,000 websites that Alexa tracks.
"Wiki" principle enabled early, rapid growth
Wikipedia is a public WikiWikiWeb, where anyone can edit nearly any page
at any time. Wiki wiki means "quick" in Hawaiian: no registration or
special knowledge is required to participate. Users build upon one
another's edits, working together even on sensitive issues, by trying to
find a neutral point of view. Incorrectly edited pages are quickly
repaired by others.
The Wikipedia project was founded in January 2001 by Internet
entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and philosopher Larry Sanger. Bomis (bomis.com
(http://www.bomis.com)), an Internet web portal owned by Wales, supplied
the financial backing and other support, while Sanger led the Wikipedia
project during its first year, as a full-time paid editor. Since then it
has operated mostly on consensus, using policies refined over time by
its contributors.
The project has recently been transferred from Bomis to the non-profit
Wikimedia Foundation (wikimediafoundation.org
(http://wikimediafoundation.org)). Bomis still provides free bandwidth
and basic server maintenance to Wikimedia.
Jimmy Wales comments that "Wikipedia owes its success to the presence of
a strong core group of well-educated and articulate contributors from
around the world who together maintain community standards of civility,
quality and neutrality." Explaining one of the mechanisms to ensure that
the article quality remains high, he said, "Participants all keep a
watchful eye over the 'recent changes' page. They edit each other's work
constantly." Even articles covering controversial topics can be worked
on using this process.
The motivation of Wikipedians is very different, but all share a love of
knowledge. "For years, I've been collecting old almanacs and
encyclopedias," comments Oliver Brown, who writes under the nickname
"Kingturtle". "To stumble on a thriving community devoted to sharing
information gave me a tremendous thrill and a curious sense of relief."
Wikipedia has been the subject of articles in the news media, among
them, The New York Times, MIT's Technology Review, and TIME magazine, as
well as, articles on high-profile technology websites such as Slashdot,
Wired, and Kuro5hin. More recently, Wikipedia has been featured on news
programs, such as National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and
CNN's television program TechWatch. It is also increasingly being used
as a reference source by students, journalists, organizations, and any
other individual who needs a starting point for doing Internet research.
All Wikimedia content is available under the terms of the GNU Free
Documentation License (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html#SEC1), which
permits anyone to reuse Wikimedia content in any way they wish,
including commercially, as long as they, too, pass on that right to
others and credit the editors of the particular Wikimedia project as the
source.
MediaWiki (mediawiki.org (http://mediawiki.org)), the software that runs
the various Wikimedia projects, is also available for free under the
terms of the GNU General Public License
(http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html#TOC1), the same license used by
the free GNU/Linux operating system. "The MediaWiki software is the best
solution yet to the problem of easily creating and maintaining
hypermedia," says Nicholas Pisarro, Jr. of Aperture Technologies, Inc.
The company uses MediaWiki to run an internal wiki knowledge base. "In
the six weeks since it has been made available internally, it has
already become an indispensable part of our development department's
operation."
With edits being made every minute of every day, it is impossible to
predict where Wikipedia and its sister projects will be one year from
now. Thanks to the GNU licenses, however, one thing is certain: the
content, and the software that serves it, will remain free.
Sister projects seek to emulate success
On June 20th 2003, the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation
(wikimediafoundation.org (http://www.wikimediafoundation.org)) was
created to manage and fund the operations of Wikipedia and its sister
projects. These include:
* Wiktionary, a multilingual dictionary and thesaurus
(wiktionary.org (http://wiktionary.org))
* Wikiquote, a compendium of famous quotations (wikiquote.org
(http://wikiquote.org))
* Wikibooks, a collection of e-book resources, aimed at the needs of
students (wikibooks.org (http://wikibooks.org))
* Wikisource, a repository of public domain historical documents and
books (wikisource.org (http://wikisource.org)).
Since its first fundraising appeal in December 2003, the Wikimedia
Foundation has raised nearly US$40,000 to support these projects, half
of which has already been invested in infrastructure. See
wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising
(http://www.wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising) for more information.
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