Wikipedia turns five years old today. It’s difficult for me to think of a website that’s done more to change the way I learn than Wikipedia. I’ve been reading E.P. Thompson’s “The Making of the English Working Class”; it’s fascinating, persuasive, and well-written, but filled with allusions to people, movements and events in English history that I don’t know: Socinianism, the Gordon Riots, Tyburn Fair, et.al. Wikipedia has been very helpful with about 90% of those references. The following clip, which is the entire text of Wikipedia’s own article on Wikipedia Day, is typical of what I find there; authoritative, non-defensive, brief and clearly written, replete with links to other articles and outside resources that might help me find what I’m looking for, or that illuminate what I’ve found. (Click on the Source link above to go to the article; then the links in it will be live.)The English Wikipedia alone now has more than 920,000 articles, with over 340,000,000 words. The millionth article is expected to appear in late February or early March. The combined Wikipedias for all languages have an estimated total of over 3,100,000 articles in some two hundred languages. Eighty-four of the non-English Wikipedias have over 1,000 articles, thirty-six have over 10,000 and seven have over 100,000.
For a few days now, Wikipedia has been listed on Alexa as the 20th most popular website in the world (one week average). The current trend should see it entering the top ten this year.
129 new servers were purchased during 2005, bringing the total to 171.[1] The Wikimedia cluster has had to be moved to another facility (also in Tampa, Florida) to obtain more space. Wikimedia now has three auxiliary server clusters, in Paris, Amsterdam and Seoul.
Though Wikipedians are celebrating, the future of Wikipedia has come into question over the last year with numerous negative stories in the media, and internal political strife. News focused on studies which found Wikipedia to have a slightly lower article accuracy than Britannica and incidents of patently false articles which have drawn international attention and criticism. In 2005 many new tools had to be introduced to deal with the growing incidents of vandalism, but have had little effect other than to keep the rate of vandalism steady. The vandalism coupled with questions about whether or not Wikipedia can ever serve as a trustworthy reference source means that 2006 will likely be a challenging and important year for the Project.
Wikipedia has been steadily increasing the number of articles it serves, with a doubling rate somewhat less than a year. (Here’s an archived snapshot of Wikipedia as it existed a little more than a month after its public debut, with over 1,000 articles, aiming at 100,000.) More importantly, the service has developed, in a communal, orderly, and democratic manner, mechanisms for insuring the accuracy of the information it presents and preventing vandals and fanatics of various stripes from interfering with its mission. Short of spending eight hours in the library, I know of no better way to get an authoritative overview of even complex and extensive subjects.
If you find Wikipedia as useful as I do, you might want to contribute something, as I have, to help them keep the service operating effectively. And even if you don’t want to contribute, at least join me in wishing Jimmy Wales and his many thousand colleagues and collaborators a very Happy Birthday!
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