Wikipedia reaches 500,000 articles in 50 languages

Dear LWN editors,

Here is a (literally) Open Source press release that should be relevant 
-- the Wikipedia has reached 500,000 articles in 50 languages, making it 
one of the largest encyclopedias in the world.  It's GNU-endorsed (see 
http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/ ), and is the world's largest and 
busiest Wiki.

-- Neil Harris

PRESS RELEASE STARTS

Wikipedia publishes 500,000 articles in 50 languages

February 25, 2004 (The Internet): Wikipedia (http://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 (213,000)
    * German (54,000)
    * Japanese (32,000)
    * French (28,000)
    * Polish (24,000)
    * Swedish (22,000)
    * Dutch (21,000)
    * Spanish (18,000)
    * Danish (16,000)
    * Esperanto (11,000)

An additional eighteen have more than 1,000 articles (rounded to the 
nearest hundred):

    * Italian (6,400)
    * Catalan (5,400)
    * Chinese (5,000)
    * Hebrew (4,700)
    * Romanian (4,600)
    * Slovenian (3,900)
    * Finnish (3,700)
    * Croatian (3,100)
    * Estonian (2,800)
    * Interlingua (2,600)
    * Norwegian (2,500)
    * Afrikaans (2,100)
    * Portuguese (2,000)
    * Latin (1,900)
    * Russian (1,600)
    * Walloon (1,300)
    * Czech (1,200)
    * Malay (1,100)

This surge in growth has, according to 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), 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). 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, 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), the software that runs the various Wikimedia 
projects, is also available for free under the terms of the GNU General 
Public License, 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) was created to manage and fund the operations 
of Wikipedia and its sister projects. These include:

    *

      Wiktionary, a multilingual dictionary and thesaurus (wiktionary.org)

    *

      Wikiquote, a compendium of famous quotations (wikiquote.org)

    *

      Wikibooks, a collection of e-book resources, aimed at the needs of
      students (wikibooks.org)

    *

      Wikisource, a repository of public domain historical documents and
      books (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 for more information.

This press release was created collaboratively by Wikipedians from many 
different countries. You can find the original version at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_releases/February_2004

Additional information

For questions and interviews, please contact:

Jimmy Wales, Chairman, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (English only)
Phone: (+1)-727-527-9776
Email: jwales@bomis.com

Andrew Lih, Asia region press contact, Hong Kong, China (English, 
Chinese Putonghua)
Phone: (+852)-9759-0220
Email: alih@hku.hk

Robert Merkel, Australian region press contact, Melbourne, Australia 
(English only)
Phone: (+61)-425-712-883
Email: rgmerk@mira.net

END OF PRESS RELEASE