English Wikipedia hits 1,000,000 articles

March 1, 2006 5:07 PM

1,000,000th article (Jordanhill railway station) - Wikipedia Press release about this milestone.
posted by Kickstart70 (22 comments total)

I predict, as stated in the tags, numerous and inventive vandalism of all sorts.
posted by Kickstart70 at 5:08 PM on March 1, 2006

Dupont must be kicking themselves.
posted by mischief at 5:13 PM on March 1, 2006

I can't help but wonder how many are generated with no human input. Like every single place in the US has a page just filled with government data. Inflates the numbers a bit.
posted by smackfu at 5:36 PM on March 1, 2006

How long will Wikipedia allow sites to use their content and slap ads on it?

Answers.com has built an entire business out of (essentially) posting Wikipedia.com content, adding some other stuff, and putting ads and shopping banners all over it.

They made something like $2m in revenue doing this last quarter.
posted by chaz at 5:43 PM on March 1, 2006

Yeah, but the data's all in one place or at least in one format, so even if it's just "government data" it's been collated and cross-referenced at least.

1,000,000's no more special than any other milestone though. 1000000 in Hex though. Whooo-eee.
posted by CommaTheWaterseller at 5:45 PM on March 1, 2006

How long will Wikipedia allow sites to use their content and slap ads on it?

Erm, forever? That's the "freedom" kind of free at work. Answers.com, specifically, cooperates with Wikipedia in doing it. Wikipedia doesn't lose anything by having other sites provide access to readers except server load.
posted by mendel at 5:54 PM on March 1, 2006

can't help but wonder how many are generated with no human input.

It's the human generated stuff that's the problem. I notice people have started creating content-free articles on every track on every album by every band.
posted by cillit bang at 7:12 PM on March 1, 2006

Also the millionth article is 600 words rambling about a railway station that isn't even big enough to be staffed.
posted by cillit bang at 7:18 PM on March 1, 2006

And it's just down the road from me! If it wasn't dark, I'd go and take a picture.
posted by bonaldi at 7:36 PM on March 1, 2006

The Scotland contributors are among the strongest on Wikipedia. They were organized in community before Wikipedia existed and do an amazing job on all things Scottish with team efforts and quality work.
posted by stbalbach at 7:40 PM on March 1, 2006

How long will Wikipedia allow sites to use their content and slap ads on it?

Answers.com has built an entire business out of (essentially) posting Wikipedia.com content, adding some other stuff, and putting ads and shopping banners all over it.

They made something like $2m in revenue doing this last quarter.

This really annoys me, but not because other sites are making money from content created for Wikipedia. What I can't stand is that when I'm trying to search for more information on something from Google, often more than 75% of the first page of results are from sites that "mirror" Wikipedia articles. It's very difficult to find new information when every "source" has the same information (or lack thereof) as every other.
posted by Godbert at 7:52 PM on March 1, 2006

Godbert: adding -wikipedia to your search terms (at least at Google) helps.

Wikipedia:Send in the clones is a discussion of the problem, and Wikipedia's options (although they're mainly concerned with GoogleRank here and not the issues of license compliance and profit). For sites that aren't in full compliance with the GFDL, Wikipedia suggests authors object. Incidentally, Answers.com is only considered to be at a "medium" level of compliance.

Anyway, seems like only yesterday it was 500,000. (Just under a year ago.)
posted by dhartung at 11:56 PM on March 1, 2006

I am currently wasting time on MetaFilter in order to delay beginning a journey that will take me through Jordanhill Station. Spooky. Or something.
posted by jack_mo at 2:42 AM on March 2, 2006

I used to use that station in the mid 80s when I attended Jordanhill Teacher Training College. Do I win a prize?
posted by PurpleJack at 5:10 AM on March 2, 2006

Statistics
posted by Tlogmer at 5:56 AM on March 2, 2006

smackfu: Check out this graph. The jump in October 2002 is the placenames being added by bot -- eyeballing it, it looks like that was about 50 thousand articles (a lot of which have provided a nice base for human expansion).
posted by Tlogmer at 5:59 AM on March 2, 2006

Interesting. So not that big a factor (about 5%).

Where do stubs come from? As mentioned above, it seems like every single album by every single artist has a stub which really has not much info at all beyond the basics. It feels like Wikipedia is running out of stuff to write about, so they're expanding into areas that are already well covered by other resources.
posted by smackfu at 6:16 AM on March 2, 2006

You can put Wikipedia on your iPod now.
posted by tellurian at 6:23 AM on March 2, 2006

It's not a centrally driven effort; some people really like music (and rote compiling :P ). I'd say wikipedia will run out of stuff to write about when humankind is over, and not before. Keep in mind that a lot of the writing is modification of existing articles, not starting new ones.
posted by Tlogmer at 6:23 AM on March 2, 2006

[[Metafilter]]
[[Matt]]

:P
posted by Tlogmer at 6:26 AM on March 2, 2006

"It feels like Wikipedia is running out of stuff to write about"

As someone who spends lots of time contributing to Wikipedia (mostly photos) I can assure you this isn't the case. Almost daily I find subjects which are missing or wildly under developed.

There is also a ton of crap, but that's balanced by the fact that hundreds of articles are deleted every day (I think that's right, can't remember where I read it).

If you want to get a realistic view of what sort of content makes up that 1,000,000 articles, just spend a few minutes clicking on the "Random article" link. I find it's mostly bio pieces.

Also, and in complete seriousness - MeFi members should spend more time over there contributing content and editing articles. Please read The five pillars of Wikipedia. MetaFilter and Wikipedia folk are very similar. Seriously. It's like AskMe on steroids. And contributing to something like this is extremely rewarding.
posted by y6y6y6 at 7:07 AM on March 2, 2006

Delete. nn and vanity.
posted by notmydesk at 9:49 AM on March 2, 2006