Wikipedia:Milestones/2001

December 2001

December 26, 2001

AxelBoldt has written a number of Bookmarklets that make it easier to search Wikipedia.

December 25, 2001

An AP story by Anick Jesdanun prominently mentions "Wales' Wikipedia encyclopedia." Merry Christmas, Jimbo!

December 20, 2001

National Public Radio ("future tense") this morning featured an interview with Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the Wiki concept. Wikipedia was mentioned, along with its URL. A real audio version of the interview is available.

Quotes from Ward:

• "The Wiki concept is much closer to the way the web was initially intended than static web pages."
• "I'd much rather have a community than a shopping mall."

Please see this page for a draft of a new statement to replace the current contents of neutral point of view. Your positive input and edits are encouraged!

December 18, 2001

The free (GNU) word processor Abiword comes with a wikipedia plugin.

Other worthwhile plugins for Wikipedia authors are:

• Dictionary plugin
• babelfish plugin
• freetranslate plugin

December 14, 2001

Wikipedia statistics/Size of Wikipedia: 19,000 articles announced.

December 9, 2001

Wikipedia is listed at number six on this month's Shiftlist at Shift Magazine, one of the best known Internet culture magazines.

The current issue of the New York Times Magazine looks at The Year of Ideas. There is an article called Populist Editing which is about the idea of wikis. Wikipedia is mentioned as "[t]he most ambitious Wiki project to date"! (Access to the New York Times requires free registration).

December 8, 2001

Erik Moeller announced on the mailing list that he has created an IRC channel called #wikipedia on the server irc.openprojects.net. Drop by and chat! See Wikipedia:IRC channels for more information on how to connect.

December 7, 2001

Wikipedia statistics/Size of Wikipedia: It was recently announced (by User:Malcolm Farmer, who kindly keeps track of these things) that Wikipedia has over 18,000 articles.

December 6, 2001

Wikipedia has a new logo, inspired by the old one, but with the text "Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia", and a nifty new epigraph for Wikipedia:

Man is distinguished, not only by his reason, but by this singular passion from other animals, which is a lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continued and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceeds the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure.

In other words, Wikipedia is better than sex (and other carnal pleasures). We have this from the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The final deliberations were made on this Meta-Wikipedia page. The new logo was designed by User:The Cunctator.

December 1, 2001

Hmmm... why isn't our chief administrator working today... could it be because today he got MARRIED????. A hearty congratulations and best wishes to User:Larry Sanger and his bride Rita from everyone at the Wikipedia.

November 2001

November 29, 2001

Join The Wikipedia Militia, recently created. The Militia is a (humorous!) organization committed to converging on Wikipedia whenever an enormous media- (or other-) inspired influx of traffic temporarily increases the potential for the abuse of the system. If Time magazine does a big writeup on Wikipedia and our population quadruples overnight (for example), we'll "call out the Militia" and gently assimilate the new contributors, whom we love (really!).

November 28, 2001

On Saturday, Dec 1, 2001, our glorious leader (well, chief administrator at least) Larry Sanger is casting off the mantle of bachelor freedom and entering into the eternal covenant of wedded bliss (ie. Larry's getting married!). Our congratulations and best wishes to them both. Please feel free to sign the Wedding card at Larrys Wedding Card - User:MMGB

November 27, 2001

The new Wikipedia logo candidates are listed here:

http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Logo_suggestions

There are a half-dozen or so that I would be perfectly happy with. Send me your opinions either on the "Logo Suggestions" page itself or privately in e-mail (lsanger at nupedia dot com). I will use my best judgment in coming to a decision, and do my best to make the most people happy. --User:LMS

November 26, 2001

We've received a whole bunch of traffic (over 2,500 visitors) over Sunday and Monday from http://www.bluesnews.com/ , where Wikipedia is the "link of the day." Blue's News is a gaming website. So keep on top of the recent edits made to gaming articles--they're likely made by new folks (who are very welcome!).

November 23, 2001

In a strange twist of fate, the Microsoft Encarta's search for "History of Microsoft Windows" results in high placement, a not insignificant amount of traffic, for Wikipedia's History of Microsoft Windows article.

November 20, 2001

We are looking for a new logo. See [1].

If you're looking for starry-eyed idealism and general inspiration, you could do far worse than Larry Sanger's "How a Giant, Free Encyclopedia Might Transform Learning" recently posted on OpenSourceSchools.org.

November 9, 2001

After some deliberation on Wikipedia-L and an essay, we have installed a new wiki, http://meta.wikipedia.com/, separate from the main Wikipedia wiki, for purposes of Wikipedia discussion and essay-writing and such. The purpose of our doing this is twofold: to keep meta-discussion separate from article writing (and thus to emphasize the importance of article writing) and to test out (and get used to) the Wikipedia PHP script. So please do visit http://meta.wikipedia.com/ both to get an idea of how the new software might work and, if you wish, to engage in meta-discussion.

Also, if you have essays linked from your personal pages (e.g., Larry Sanger/Columns) or from Wikipedia commentary, could you please move that content to http://meta.wikipedia.com/ ?

November 6, 2001

Wikipedia can now include TeX or LaTeX formulas (as PNGs) in articles. If you would like to have a formula turned into a PNG, go to http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Edward_O'Connor/TeXinbox and add it to the list!

Size of Wikipedia: 16,000 articles announced. Although we have grown faster in the weeks following September 11, press coverage and Slashdotting, we now--without help from significant press coverage--seem to be growing at a steady rate of somewhat better than 2,000 articles per month. At this rate, we will have 25,000 articles by next April and 40,000 articles by next November. (Of course, no one really knows if this rate is sustainable, but it could be--for all we know, it will increase!)

Announcement from User:Larry Sanger:

I think we've discussed subpages quite a bit--certainly enough to air the issues and give people a chance to state their views and change their minds--and in view of this, I've decided to get rid of them.

Let me explain this decision--I'm done arguing for it, but of course you are owed an explanation, since the issue has been very controversial.

Examining the various pages on which people have discussed them, it seems there is at least a majority of people in favor of getting rid of them or who are amenable to the idea of getting rid of them. I think it's pretty important, although perhaps not absolutely essential in every case, that we at least not contradict majority opinion, when a consensus cannot be arrived at. The majority includes many old hands who have had more experience with the problems associated with subpages than some of their newer advocates, which I also think is important. Finally, and probably as importantly as anything else, my well considered opinion is that the arguments in favor of getting rid of them are much, much stronger than the arguments in favor of keeping them. I predict yer gonna thank me in a year. (Maybe not all of you. :-) ) --User:Larry Sanger

See also Wikipedia subpages pros and cons, Larry Sanger/Why I am suspicious of subpages, Larry Sanger/Accidental linking and hard-wired category schemes, Larry Sanger/The case against subpages, Wikipedia commentary/Get rid of subpages entirely.

November 5, 2001

Wikipedia front page has now a PageRank (Google Rank) of 7/10.

November 2, 2001

Wikipedia statistics: Jimbo's been looking at various Wikipedia statistics, and one interesting statistic has surfaced: the number of people (unique IPs) that have edited Wikipedia on any given day of October ranged from 96 to 236, with the vast majority of days between 130 and 180. After the recently increased traffic from Google, it seems we can expect an average number of daily editors of about 170. We can expect this number to continue to climb, however, as the virtuous cycle of content-traffic-contributors-more content continues into the indefinite future.

The number of unique visitors (editors or not) ranged from 3,112 to 7,983 in October, with a pre-October 28 average of about 5,000; the post-October 28 average is shaping up to be something like 8,000. The latter is not expected to decline, because it is not due to press coverage, but instead to (we expect) stable and growing factors related to the amount of traffic Google sends us.

While we're at it, pageviews ranged from 21,491 (on a very slow weekend day) to 48,321. They are now very much on the high end of this range.

All of these statistics are, by the way, enormous increases over just, say, three months ago.

October 2001

October 29, 2001

A lot of news!

Wikipedia traffic: Yesterday, Wikipedia began receiving a substantially increased amount of traffic from Google.com, which will probably result in a permanent traffic increase of over 20% compared with the few weeks leading up to yesterday. We're not sure yet why this is happening. Google already was far and away the most important source of traffic for Wikipedia. If the increase is permanent, then in terms of new personnel and increased article production and editing, we can expect that this will have a long-term effect similar to that of a major news article or of a Slashdotting.

Nupedia is about to announce the results of a vote on the details of its new editorial system. Once these details are announced and agreed, then, among other things, Nupedia will be turning to the issue of how it can make use of Wikipedia articles. You're encouraged to join Nupedia-L if you'd like to see the Nupedia side of these issues; any issues directly affecting Wikipedia will be brought up on Wikipedia's mailing list, Wikipedia-L. Please do join Wikipedia-L if you are interested in Wikipedia policy!

Magnus Manske is on the verge of recommending that Wikipedia switch to his very fine Wikipedia PHP script. This is good news, but it makes some of us, no doubt Magnus included, a little nervous. (This is not to say we don't have great faith in Magnus.) But we need your help with testing. Go to [2] and do some bug-hunting. Does it work as you expected? Does it have all the functionality of the old Wikipedia software (that we want to keep)?

Recently, Wikipedians have been thinking hard about how best to make Wikipedia fully compliant with the GNU Free Documentation License. Jimbo Wales and Larry Sanger have long been of the understanding that, as in the case of Nupedia, Wikipedia would require links back to Wikipedia articles, for the purpose of further building Wikipedia's base of contributors and articles. Once this requirement was, recently, made explicit in the form of a particular HTML table (see license instructions page), some Wikipedians had objections; we hope to reach a consensus on Wikipedia-L.

October 25, 2001

Size of Wikipedia: Wikipedia has passed 15,000 articles. There were 17307 "comma" articles, of which 1600 are

See also : Wikipedia Announcements/Talk subpages. Of the remainder, 399 were wikipedians own pages, and 229 are pages about wikipedia, i.e contained "ikipedia" somewhere in the title. Take out 26 for the Biographical listings indexes, and that still leaves 15053 pages.

The most basic encyclopedia article topics was created.

October 19, 2001

14,000 articles announced.

October 12, 2001

Nupedia will probably be set up as, in part, an approval mechanism for Wikipedia articles.

On October 10, Larry Sanger made a proposal to Nupedia's advisory board (the Advisory-L mailing list) that would greatly simplify the Nupedia editorial process. In the last few days, over a half-dozen editors and reviewers have written in to express their support for the plan, with dissent only on relatively minor details. So it is certain that Nupedia will be adopting a new simpler system.

In brief, under Sanger's proposal, Nupedia would adopt a traditional review process and do away with nearly all of the bottlenecks--and the public review along with it--of the present system. Articles, once approved by an editor, a referee, and perhaps a copyeditor, would be posted on the Nupedia website and be available for public comment.

Part of this proposal is important to the future of Wikipedia, and reads as follows:

I think it's important that we supplement the above proposal by creating a link on Wikipedia article pages labelled: "Submit this article to Nupedia." This would link to a page that would solicit further information from the submitter and then place the Wikipedia article in the Nupedia queue for approval or rejection. Submission information would be reported on the Wikipedia Recent Changes page, as would final approvals and rejections of articles in the Nupedia system.

Now, perhaps we'd be flooded with articles that the editor would simply reject with the press of a button and thereby do a bit toward teaching Wikipedians about the standards Nupedia upholds. Having to do this might be very annoying to editors, however; we might, in that case, want to limit who can nominate Wikipedia articles to some select group of Wikipedians. Moreover, we might make only Wikipedia-approved articles...nominatable for Nupedia.

Also, in the past week or so, traffic levels have levelled off and stabilized at levels over twice what they were before September 11.

A Wikipedia article (programming language) is actually required reading for a college course (a Pakistani university, it seems, but it's hard to tell). See [3]. Other articles have been used as reference information in other courses (see [4]), and in one case previously, an article was part of the "course materials" (see [5]). But the programming language article seems to be the first Wikipedia article that is specifically labelled as part of a reading assignment.

October 7, 2001

Most of the problems due to traffic levels are now under control. XXXXXX

October 5, 2001

The current levels of traffic are overloading Wikipedia's software, causing intermittent problems with viewing and editing pages, but improvements are made to the server to reduce the problems. One thing Wikipedians can do to help is change, on their Preferences page, their Recent Changes "Default days to display" to 1 or 2, instead of the current default of 7.

Among the problems the traffic levels are causing is that Wikipedia does not display links to newly-created pages as working links--for example, diaspora and foundationalism. There are also still intermittent delays and failures in editing pages. To be safe, if you're making extensive edits to a page, consider saving drafts of your work to a file on your computer. (Once your final draft is saved to Wikipedia, regardless of how links are displayed, the information will be saved.)

October 4, 2001

Wikipedia now has over 13,000 articles. A count this morning of articles large enough to contain at least a comma, and excluding talk pages, Wikipedia pages, and Wikipedians pages gave 13,182 pages. (My list of Wikipedians is a little out of date, so I delayed by a day to compensate for undercounting of Wikipedians pages.)

Articles are now being added at a consistent rate of over 100 a day, or 3,000 a month. It is just six days since we passed the 12,000 article mark.

October 1, 2001

Intlwiki-L has just been created. If you are interested in the future of the Wikipedias in non-English languages, please subscribe.

Swedish programmer Lars Aronsson has installed an interesting search function on his wiki, http://susning.nu/. The search function allows someone visiting a given page to search Wikipedia for articles on that page's topic.

September 2001

September 29, 2001

Magnus Manske has just loaded some test software at [6] If you are the type that likes to see the things that are currently broken in the newest code revision then take a look. It is NOT ready for more that test articles, but with a few eyeballs...

September 28, 2001

In reaction to articles in the Danish press, we have set up a "Danish Wikipedia": both http://dk.wikipedia.com/ and http://da.wikipedia.com/ will reach the same website. We've also set up a Polish language Wikipedia at http://pl.wikipedia.com and http://polish.wikipedia.com .

Beginning next Tuesday (when Jason Richey returns from a weekend vacation), we are going to be taking the non-English Wikipedias more seriously:

1. We'll be setting up non-English Wikipedias for all the other major languages (including many we've omitted).
2. We'll be actively seeking out translations of the main text (e.g., the GNU license notice), and uploading the translations. I.e., we will going to Wikipedia-L, to the individual non-English Wikipedias, and perhaps also to specific individuals, requesting the text and promising to upload it immediately upon receipt.
3. We will soon (probably today) set up an International Wikipedia standards mailing list, which would explain set basic standards that we would like all Wikipedias to follow (think of it as the UN).

September 27, 2001

Wikipedia exceeds 12,000 articles. Since we passed the 11,000 mark on September 19, we have been adding an average of 125 articles per day, for a total of 1,000 articles in eight days. Of course, we can't realistically expect to maintain this rate beyond the next few days (since the effects of press coverage are generally short-lived), but if we did, we would have over 50,000 articles by next October.

September 26, 2001

Another huge-traffic day: over 8,000 unique visitors again (more than yesterday).

September 25, 2001

Today was one of our most active days, the most active day since our Slashdotting last July--over 8,000 unique visitors today, and over 64,000 pageviews. Some of this traffic was from Kuro5hin, but that story was picked up by a plethora of tech weblogs; moreover, Wikipedia was written up by a few different Spanish language and Portuguese websites.

As a result, it seems that another group of solid and enthusiastic hands has joined us. Welcome, folks!

September 24, 2001

Kuro5hin readers are visiting again--please, regulars, welcome them! The news about Stallman's endorsement (and other recent events) is the subject of a Kuro5hin article.

The Times article of September 20 was re-published today in the International Herald Tribune, a newspaper available at every non-US airport and business hotel on the planet. It was the lead article in the Technology section.

September 23, 2001

The famous free software exponent Richard Stallman calls Wikipedia's success "really exciting news." He has directed his webmasters to install a link to Wikipedia from the GNU encyclopedia page, alongside the Nupedia link--which they have done.

September 20, 2001

A quite positive New York Times article on Wikipedia has appeared today (page D2, "Circuits" section). An online version is available. Given the healthy but limited amount of traffic so far this morning and the fact that the story is buried pretty deep inside the nytimes.com website, the article probably won't bury us in traffic. Still, it's excellent publicity! If we're lucky, the NYT coverage will result in further coverage from other sources. In any case, if you can spare the time, please be on hand to help guide the new folks into the process!

An ongoing discussion of a possible Wikipedia approval mechanism was articulated, and further discussion started.

September 19, 2001

11,000 articles announced.

September 14, 2001

The word is now that the New York Times article about Wikipedia--for which Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger have been interviewed and photographed--will appear on Thursday the 20th. At that time we will probably receive greater-than-usual amount of traffic, and there's a fairly good chance we'll be completely inundated with traffic, not only from the NYT but from other websites that carry the same story. The assistance of Wikipedia old hands at that time will be greatly appreciated.

September 11, 2001

The most active page on Wikipedia was this one: September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack.

(In the succeeding days this became a very popular page, with several links to it.)

September 10, 2001

Update about the Technology Review article: it is now linked-to from the Wired main page, and thus we're receiving a fresh infusion of traffic.

September 7, 2001

An article count this morning just passed 10,000 articles! The rate of new article addition now seems to be a steady 2,000 articles a month; Larry's hope of 100,000 articles eventually looks more and more feasible as momentum builds up...

• how they were counted

September 6, 2001

Wikipedia now has an external links page. Have a look! If you have linked to Wikipedia, please add your page to that page. (Even personal home pages and weblogs are listed.)

September 4, 2001

I've been maintaining a Wiki dedicated to Charles Darwin for classes I teach at Arizona State University. It's very much a work in progress, but I'm inviting Wikipedians with an interest to pilfer from it as they wish, and (more importantly) to contribute if they wish! The address is http://darwin.home.dhs.org . I eventually intend to give a permanent home to all of Darwin's works and many, many graphic images - both of which may prove useful for the Wikipedia. John Lynch

Sounds great, John. I'm also glad to learn that your resource will be open content--this means that, with some effort, we will be able to keep the relevant parts of Wikipedia updated with your help. --Larry Sanger

New publicity for Wikipedia: the New York Times has been scooped by Judy Heim of MIT's Technology Review. By the way, this the website's lead story (today, anyway)!

A Columbia U. physics professor thinks some Wikipedia math articles are worth linking to.

August 2001

August 30, 2001

The first article-a-day e-mail was sent out today--the text of Milgram experiment. Good job, Toan!

August 24, 2001

I was asked to put the PHP script up here, so: Wikipedia PHP script -- Magnus Manske

Background: next week or the week after that, the New York Times will run an article that features Wikipedia, among other websites. It is possible (how likely, we still don't know) that we will be completely inundated with traffic, as a result. This has made it extremely important that we upgrade, as soon as possible, to WikiWiki software that can handle a lot of new traffic. Among the features we need most is database-driven software. Magnus has spent some of his copious summer free time creating some new code. The plan now is to make it as easy as possible for Wikipedian programmers to be able to work on this new code, so that we ourselves can create the new features that we want!

August 22, 2001

A count this morning showed that of the 10001 articles large enough to contain a comma, 725 are /Talk pages, 88 are pages about wikipedia, and 145 are authors' pages: that leaves 9043 articles. Even allowing for some undercount on these categories, wikipedia would appear to have passed 9000 articles.

August 19, 2001

A Thai website adapted the Wikipedia article (with what looks like acceptable attribution) about Kejmanee Pichaironnarongsongkram. It's possible that this is the first instance of Wikipedia content being adapted for use outside Wikipedia--that's a cause for celebration! August 17, 2001

The German Wikipedia now has over 1,000 pages! Ausgezeichnet!

August 15, 2001

You can now get the code and data for the Wikipedia wikis here (in giant tarballs for each site). This means that programmers can now (if they can figure out how :-) ) use Wikipedia articles on their own websites and work on Wikipedia code.

In other news, recent discussions on Wikipedia-L as well as on Larry Sanger/An impending scalability problem have raised some interesting questions about the future of Wikipedia. It seems that many are now desiring some way to sort through the RecentChanges page more easily, because (not that we're complaining or anything) there are so many of us at work now that there are hundreds of edits per day--making it difficult to identify edits in which we're interested and distinguish them from other edits. Various solutions are being considered.

August 7, 2001

Wikipedia passes 8,000 articles. See new topics for examples.

July 2001

July 27, 2001

Wikipedia passes 7,000 pages. It would have done so within the next day or so, but yesterday's slashdotting advanced the schedule... A check five minutes ago showed 7808 pages with enough content to contain a comma (ie excluding redirects, one-liners and lists); of these, approximately 106 are wikipedians pages, 56 are about wikipedia, and 403 are /talk subpages: with all these excluded, that makes 7243 pages. Yesterday's total, pre-slashdot, was 6947. Nice work!

Welcome to all the new people! Isn't Wikipedia great? The fact that much of the work done is of OK quality, and some of it is pretty good, bespeaks the robustness of the Wikipedia concept. Just don't forget to be bold in updating pages!

July 26, 2001

Yea, brother, the below-mentioned Gospel Truth has been Slashdotted. This means there are many eager, but clueless newbies about. Old hands, never before has your help been more urgently needed. New hands, welcome! Have fun, but read the instructions!

July 25, 2001

Larry Sanger has told the Gospel Truth about why Wikipedia and Nupedia will rule the world someday. See his (front page) Kuro5hin story. By the way, this means there is going to be a lot of traffic. Wikipedia regulars, please check the website regularly over the next few days to make sure the newbies stay in line.

July 24, 2001

It was recently reported that Britannica is becoming a pay site. We (everyone who cares about Wikipedia!) need therefore to get the word out that Wikipedia is a free alternative. How can you help? In the near future, instead of writing Wikipedia articles, use your Wikipedia time to post on mailing lists and newsgroups words to the effect that Britannica might be becoming a pay site, but Wikipedia is free and always will be--and in the space of a few years, it will be bigger than Britannica. They should be quakin' in their boots. Anyway, please do help. Post to a few mailing lists and newsgroups--get the word out. It's important we do this now, and that we mention (and link to) the Britannica story. It will gain us many converts.

We're now working on a joint Nupedia/Wikipedia press release as well as a Kuro5hin story.

July 19, 2001

Nupedia has recently started its own article development wiki, which it is calling the Nupedia Chalkboard. Please see the Chalkboard's homepage. This is a step in the direction to increasing useful interaction between Nupedia and Wikipedia: it will now be extremely easy to put the best Wikipedia articles in the queue for inclusion in Nupedia. For more information, see Larry's introduction to the Chalkboard. 

July 8, 2001

Wikipedia is now metasearched by cnet's search.com.

In case anyone cares, we now have over 10,000 pages! According to work done by User:Malcolm Farmer, we have something upwards of 6,000 articles; possibly something close to 7,000.

June 2001

June 28, 2001

A link to our VIM article is on the front page of the official VIM site: http://www.vim.org

June 26, 2001

Wikipedia is now useful! In this exciting new development, Larry Sanger noticed that he could look stuff up in Wikipedia that he didn't know, and answer a few questions he had, just as one does with a real encyclopedia. He couldn't do that a few months ago, and now he can. This might be a reflection of the fact that, in less than six months, Wikipedians have created 9,595 pages, and 6,716 of these are "comma pages." Wikipedia is great!

June 19, 2001

A week ago, User:Hornlo gave a very good concrete suggestion that we simplify the HomePage, and it met with popular approval, so we did! We've also added a new section to the homepage: "Other Category Schemes." Also recently, BryceHarrington has been updating a new Wikipedia NEWS page, which gives regular news about what articles are being edited. Interesting and good work, Bryce!

Finally, earlier this month we have updated the brilliant prose page with links to much of Nupedia's finest content. It's quite amazing how much good stuff there is on Wikipedia already. We invite you to help keep that page updated with links to the best of Wikipedia.

Mid-June, 2001

The July 2001 edition of 'Australian PC World' magazine was issued, with a feature article on Wikipedia, highlighting this site as the 'editor's choice' web site of the month. Written by Aldis Ozols, the article compared Wikipedia to 'Everything2' (reviewed the previous month), and seemed to knock how open to vandalism Wikipedia was. The author said it was an 'interesting experiment' and contained 'some surprisingly accurate articles.

May 2001

May 20, 2001

Big news! A few days ago, we started up about a dozen "International Wikipedias"--i.e., encyclopedia wikis in other languages. Please see International Wikipedia for details, and please help publicize this!

In other news, Wikipedia has been growing in breadth at breakneck speed. Where as just ten days ago we 3,969 "comma" pages, we are now up to 4,985. This is primarily the doing of a few relatively new hands like Koyaanis Qatsi, User:LA2, User:Wathiik, User:Mjausson, and others (sorry if you weren't mentioned). The number of raw pages is just over 7,231. Wow!

May 10, 2001

Wikipedia continues to move full steam ahead. Today is the five month anniversary of Wikipedia's founding (an early version appeared as part of nupedia.com on January 10, 2001). So, how many articles do we have? We have 5,964 pages on the website, total; 4,264 articles of 150 characters or more (two or three sentences); 3,969 "comma" articles; and 1,002 articles of 2,000 characters or more (about three ordinary-sized paragraphs. At this rate, in a year, we can expect to see 10,000 "comma" articles.

May 2, 2001

Wikipedia is moving! We are going to move wikipedia to a newer server on May 3. You can expect wikipedia to be unavailable for a period of about a half an hour, sometime between 11:00am and 2:00pm PST. During this period, I will be copying the current data to the new server. The outage is simply to protect the loss of any changes that might have been made during that time.

April 2001

April 27, 2001

Stats update: 5041 pages, 3281 "comma" pages, 912 #REDIRECT pages -- WojPob

April 1, 2001

Google has been crawling through Wikipedia and including pages in their database rather slowly. For example, though the Wikipedia History of Levant page is the #1 item for the search "History of Levant", the cached version is from way back on February 19 and the cached version of ethical egoism is from March 2. Despite the delay, we have a slowly-growing source of traffic--and therefore more contributors, and therefore (very possibly, anyway) an increasing rate of article-writing--from Google and Google-using search engines like Yahoo! and Netscape. The news then, though it's surely not great news to many, is that on Wikipedia "the rich (will) get richer"; or "if we build it, they will come" and in greater and greater numbers.

March 2001

March 30, 2001

Slashdotted again! One "jwales" has written "Wikipedia hits 2000 articles" as a reply to a post about Everything2. (Score:5, Informative--wow! Way to go, jwales!)

Yep, and as a result all these new addic...I mean new contributors have joined us. Of course, most have been contributing the computing area and techie subjects but it seems they do beadwork or play whist in their spare time.

Actual statistics as of 1:37 PM PST, March 30, 2001: 3,577 pages; 2,221 "comma" pages (pages containing commas); 2,365 pages with at least 150 characters; 553 articles with at least 2,000 characters (roughly, three normal-sized paragraphs).

March 28, 2001

Consider adding Nupedia articles to Wikipedia. More importantly (?), consider adding Wikipedia articles to Nupedia!

March 24, 2001

We have broken 3,000 pages! As impressive as this sounds, it's misleading, because very many of the pages are redirection pages and "one-liners." A slightly more accurate count can be achieved by using the search function (at the bottom of every page) to search for "," (comma). This excludes redirection pages and many one-liners. At present, the count of "comma" articles is at 1,910--we can expect to break the 2,000 level of "comma" articles within the next few days.

P.S. As of 11:20pm EST there were 2056 pages with at least 150 characters. Of those pages, 796 had at least 1,000 characters and 159 pages had 5,000 or more characters. (To search by minimum length, search for (.| ){150} and replace 150 with the desired number of characters.) There were also 634 redirection pages (search for ^#REDIRECTs for a list).

March 23, 2001

Nupedia finally announced to its members the existence of Wikipedia; as a result, we have had a nice, modest influx of traffic.

In related events, recently a discussion was started on Advisory-L and Nupedia-L, two Nupedia mailing lists, pointing to the fact that Wikipedia had made fantastic progress while Nupedia seemed relatively inefficient. It has been suggested that Nupedia might take a clue, somehow, from Wikipedia's progress, in redesigning its own system. This, too, accounts for the recent influx of traffic on Wikipedia.

March 7, 2001

We've broken 2,000 articles! As of this writing, we have 2,144 individual pages. This enormous jump in production is due to the massive influx of people from the Slashdot.org mention of Wikipedia--contrary to fears, people who seem to understand what's going on here very well and are (it seems) rapidly getting addicted.  :-)

As impressive as the 2,000 mark sounds, it's misleading, because very many of the pages are redirection pages and "one-liners." A slightly more accurate count can be achieved by using the search function (at the bottom of every page) to search for "," (comma). This excludes redirection pages and many one-liners. At present, the count of "comma" articles is at 1,323. Still very impressive.

Jimbo Wales and Larry Sanger and no doubt some others think Wikipedia's going to be huge.

March 6, 2001

Jimbo was wrong! We have had a massive influx of people writing a lot of interesting, good articles. Nothing to fear, it seems! March 5 really was a sort of banner day--probably set a record in terms of number of edits and number of new articles.

If you've got a minute, think about publicizing Wikipedia. Think about leveraging effort--in the time it takes you to write two decent articles, you might be able to get ten people on board who can write ten decent articles apiece.

March 5, 2001

The Slashdot interview just now appeared on Slashdot.org, but the link to this site is buried fairly deeply. So we may not have the massive influx that I had hoped and feared. :-) --Jimbo Wales

March 3, 2001

The how does one edit a page page has been given a thorough overhaul. Wiki experts, please help edit that page!

February 2001

February 28, 2001

Jimbo Wales is being interviewed by Slashdot, and the interview may appear tomorrow (Thursday) morning. He mentioned Wikipedia in the interview, and we may experience a substantial surge in traffic. Based on what has happened to other wikis mentioned on slashdot, we might expect to see some vandalism. If all the active participants could log in a bit more often tomorrow to keep an eye on things, that would be great.

Notice, we've added a little something to the top of the page: "Get involved! Wikipedia is a free community project!" And also another "Edit text of this page" link, now at the top of the page. We're hoping to make it clear to visitors unfamiliar with the wiki concept (which is most of them) that this is a community-edited project.

February 19, 2001

We have now upgraded to version 0.91 of the UseModWiki Wiki software. This will allow us to have Free Links!

Also -- Google has found us! Only a few hits so far..

February 12, 2001

I think we are over 1000 pages now. If we create 1000 pages a month, we will be able to hit 100,000 pages in only 8 years. However, I think that as we grow, we will attract more people to work on the pages, and we'll end up growing faster and faster.

So far, the search engines have not found us. --User:Jimbo Wales

February 8, 2001

We're up to 900 pages as of this morning!

There are whispers that the newest version of the software that runs Wikipedia will soon arrive. This means no longer will we have to indicate links LikeThis.

Bomis.com has put up a link to Wikipedia, Nupedia.com has taken theirs down (from the main page) but put up a new one in the member area which supplements the one already on the about page.

February 5, 2001

TimShell is working on an enormous "Cliff Notes"-style summary of Ayn Rand's book AtlasShrugged. We have also been graced with an enormous entry about Ernest Hemingway.

We've added some rules to consider for you to consider, sign, modify, and add to. But those of you who don't like rules can go about your business. Ain't wiki great?  :-)

February 1, 2001

TimShell found this cool image file: http://www.wikipedia.com/wikia.gif

I uploaded it to the server. I suspect we should resave it as a different file type.

I have also uploaded User:Larrys Text to the server, so now Wikipedia has a veritable boatload of philosophical content. Now all we have to do is wikify it and remove the bullshit. :-) -- User:Larry Sanger

January 2001

January 31, 2001

I am adding a page called NobelPrize, where we can list all the winners by category, and eventually fill in with short biographies.

We're up to 617 pages. Very many of these have substantial and what appears to be reliable information. I predict 1,000 by February 15. Wikipedia is growing steadily in breadth and depth.

January 27, 2001

Some interesting activity has been happening on WikipediaL lately. RequestedArticles page added.

January 26, 2001

Exciting developments are happening on the BritannicaPublicDomain, WhichWikiShouldWeUse, and BadJokesAndOtherDeletedNonsense pages.

January 25, 2001

Since this wiki first started, January 10, 2001, we have made 270 pages! Wow!

Hello! My name is Bob

January 24, 2001

Wikipedia has definitely taken a life of its own; new people are arriving every day and the project seems to be getting only more popular. Long live Wikipedia!

January 22, 2001

GNU people are using Wikipedia to discuss their stuff, which is very cool. Go to GNUStufF to partake.

January 21, 2001

Wikipedia-L (see WikipediaL), a new mailing list for Wikipedia, now exists!

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On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia.com "went public." An earlier version existed briefly on Nupedia.com from Jan. 10-15.