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Print 12 comment(s) - last by Eris23007.. on Mar 3 at 1:49 PM
A major milestone for the controversal online encyclopedia

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced that Wikipedia, the extremely popular online encyclopedia has published its first millionth article. Wikipedia gained enormous popularity due to the fact that it covered all sorts of topics, and its own readers are the ones that contribute, add to, and refine the articles that are published. Using a technology called Wiki, the online publication allows users to make edits and changes directly to the published article. Of course, the changes are self moderating and scanned by other users. There is always a case of vandalism, but it is quickly taken care of by the technology's own approval and reversal system as well as the users that read the site.

Although its method of editing is new and controversial, Wikipedia has already won acclaim and awards for its detailed coverage of current events, popular culture, and scientific topics; its usability; and its international community of contributors.

Wikipedia can be found in 127 different languages and is availabe to anyone.  The one millionth article was about a railway station in Scotland.

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PUBLISHED not really
By lincher on 3/2/2006 2:02:32 PM , Rating: 2
What I find a bit upsetting is that they say that 1M articles have been published but in fact they are merely present on the net and if the WP computers crashed (I do not want it to happen) then all there is left is no article. So these articles aren't published but available to the public or present on the website.




RE: PUBLISHED not really
By isaacmacdonald on 3/2/2006 4:45:33 PM , Rating: 3
There's such a thing as online publishing. This is one such case.

Also, "merely present on the net" makes it sound as though all that stands between 1m articles and 0 is a faulty actuator on an 80gb maxtor. Any site as serious as wikipedia is likely to have massive amounts of redundancy and frequent backup intervals.

I think we've come to the point where online publishing can be considered as legitimate as old fashioned plate + ink printing.


RE: PUBLISHED not really
By mikeblas on 3/2/2006 9:38:43 PM , Rating: 2
Publishing usually involves better editing. Academic publishing, including writing printed encyclopedia articles, involves strict peer review.

While, in theory, Wikipedia governs itself over time, it's also not hard to find complete crap among its million topics.

The backups are frequent -- if you consider two weeks frequent. They copy everything to giant XML files. Ever try to read a 350 gigabyte XML file? (I have: I wrote a program to load it into my SQL Server machine at home. It ran for 11 days before it finished.)


RE: PUBLISHED not really
By OvErHeAtInG on 3/2/2006 11:58:00 PM , Rating: 3
It isn't hard to find complete crap in the bookstore either. Simply because something isn't peer-reviewed doesn't mean it isn't published.


heh
By stephenbrooks on 3/2/2006 5:36:32 PM , Rating: 3
Sorry to be a troll, but the opening sentence of Wiki's 1M article is priceless:
quote:
Jordanhill railway station is a railway station in the Jordanhill area of Glasgow, Scotland.




RE: heh
By mikeblas on 3/2/2006 9:29:51 PM , Rating: 4
That's what happens when you go for quantity instead of quality. There's an article for each Yes, Dear episode, plus one for each Simpsons episode, and piles of Pokémon articles: its characters, games, books, geography, and so on. There are more Pokémon articles than articles about China.

I like Wikipedia, and work on editing it myself, sometimes. But it's just amazing how much energy people put into pure crap.


i can't visit the wiki at china
By kyoby on 3/2/2006 10:13:50 PM , Rating: 2
if wiki can limit some information and let chinese government open it
i think it will have more and more visitors




By Eris23007 on 3/3/2006 1:49:17 PM , Rating: 3

Better idea: The chinese government stop censoring what its people can see. Then the rest of us don't suffer for their bullsh*t policies.


In other news...
By Eris23007 on 3/2/2006 1:42:53 PM , Rating: 4
"In other news, the Wikimedia Foundation announced today the one-billionth post resulting from a WikiWar. As their in-tar-web connections melted from overuse, they thanked the 0.01% of warring wikipedia users for wasting such inordinate amounts of time by investing countless hours of time 'improving' and/or 'correcting' others' entries."

:-D




127 languages
By sherm4n on 3/2/2006 12:58:49 PM , Rating: 1
Isn't it kind of strange that it says "wikipedia is availible in 127" languages and then the link to english wikipedia follows? :-P




RE: 127 languages
By deeznuts on 3/2/2006 1:17:26 PM , Rating: 2
Um no. I think it can be safely assumed the reader of this english site, if they wanted a link would want that link to be the english version of wikipedia.


RE: 127 languages
By Le Québécois on 3/2/06, Rating: 0
"We are going to continue to work with them to make sure they understand the reality of the Internet.  A lot of these people don't have Ph.Ds, and they don't have a degree in computer science." -- RIM co-CEO Michael Lazaridis









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