English Wikipedia reaches 1 million articles

         English Wikipedia Publishes Millionth Article
         ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES, March 1, 2006

The Wikimedia Foundation announced Wednesday the creation of the
1,000,000th article in the English language edition of Wikipedia.
The article is about the Jordanhill railway station
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordanhill_railway_station] in Scotland,
and was started by Wikipedia contributor Ewan Macdonald
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nach0king]. Wikipedia is a free,
multilingual, online encyclopedia with 3.3 million articles under
development in more than 125 languages.

The full text of the English Wikipedia is located at 
http://en.wikipedia.org. In addition to articles, the English Wikipedia 
offers dozens of graphical timelines and subject-specific portals. Its 
media repository includes four hundred thousand images and hundreds of 
full-length songs, videos, and animations, many of which are available for 
free distribution.

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. BBC News has called Wikipedia 
"One of the most reliably useful sources of information around, on or 
off-line." Daniel Pink, author and WIRED Magazine columnist, has described 
Wikipedia as "the self-organizing, self-repairing, hyperaddictive library 
of the future," and Tim Berners-Lee, father of the Web, has called it "The 
Font of All Knowledge."

Wikipedia is among the world's most popular websites, receiving tens of 
millions of visitors every day.  It is a project of the Wikimedia 
Foundation, and has spawned sister projects, including a dictionary, a 
library of textbooks, a compendium of quotations, a news site, and a media 
repository. These projects are all run using the open source MediaWiki 
software [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki].

Other articles created within the same minute included an overview of the 
Tennessee Commissioner of Financial Institutions 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Commissioner_of_Fi..., 
a biography of baseball player Aaron Ledesma 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Ledesma], and a look at cellular 
architecture [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cellular_architecture].

== About Wikipedia ==

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free
access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."
  --Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation

Started in January 2001, Wikipedia is the world's most current, 
fastest-growing, and largest encyclopedia.  It is created entirely by 
volunteers who contribute, update, and revise articles in a collaborative 
process.  The English language edition contains 20 million internal links, 
and incorporates 65,000 edits and 1,700 new articles each day.

Wikipedia's content is written for a general audience, and is continually 
revised for clarity, readability, and accuracy.  Original text, images and 
sounds contributed to Wikipedia are licensed under the GNU Free 
Documentation Licence (GFDL) [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html#SEC1], 
which lets users copy and modify each other's work based on a principle 
known as "copyleft." The entire database can be freely downloaded in full.

Though the project faced criticism in 2005 for factual inaccuracies in 
some articles, the science journal Nature published a study in December 
which found Wikipedia's science content to have only slightly more errors 
per article than that of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Other, less formal 
external peer reviews have been generally positive.

== About Wikimedia ==

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an international non-profit organization 
dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, 
multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these 
wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation 
operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in 
the world, including Wikipedia, one of the 25 most visited websites. 
Wikipedia and Wikimedia's awards include the Webby Award, the Prix Ars 
Electronica Golden Nica, the Japan Advertisers Association's Web Creation 
Award, and the World Technology Award in Communications Technology.

The Wikimedia Foundation was created in 2003 to manage the operation of 
existing projects, and is based in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA. 
Wikimedia has local chapters in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, 
Italy, Serbia and Montenegro, and Poland. Chapters in Canada, India, 
China, Australia and the Netherlands are among those currently in 
development.

Most of the Foundation's operations are funded by reader and contributor 
donations, usually of USD$50 or less.  Its 2005 budget was USD$739,200, 
and based on traffic growth, the 2006 budget is expected to be 
significantly higher.

== Further information ==
* The Wikimedia Foundation [http://wikimediafoundation.org]
* About Wikipedia''' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia]
* Press coverage [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_coverage]
* Introduction to editing Wikipedia 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction)]
* Wikipedia's best articles 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles]
* External peer reviews 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_peer_review]

== Contact ==
For questions and interviews, please email press@wikimedia.org, or
(in English only) contact directly:

Jimmy Wales, Chair, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation
   Email: jwales@wikia.com  | 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales
   Phone: +1-310-474-3223

Angela Beesley, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation
   Email: abeesley@wikimedia.org  | 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Angela
   Phone: (+44)-208-816-7308

For regional and local contacts in your area, please see 
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room .


== Suggested Images ==

Wikipedia logo without text
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikipedia-logo.png

Wikipedia logo with text
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikipedia-logo-en...

Jimmy Wales speaking in Brussels in 2005
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Jimbo-wales---fos...

Jimmy Wales at "Parc des Buttes Chaumont", a park in Paris.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Jimbo_Wales_in_Fr...

Jimmy Wales on the Hohlbeinsteg bridge in Frankfurt, Germany.
Behind him you can see the river Main and the sky scrapers of Frankfurt.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Jimbo-Frankfurt-s...

Three MediaWiki developers programming at Wikimania, the annual Wikimedia
Conference, in Frankfurt in 2005.  The 2006 conference will be held at 
Harvard University in Boston.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Brion_vibber_deve...

Wikipedians having dinner in Frankfurt, Germany during Wikimania 2005.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikimania_053.jpg