Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-10-28/Community letter

Community letter

Five million articles

A brief history

Wikipedia officially launched on 15 January 2001, with Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as its leaders, on a single computer server as the successor to Nupedia. Its first major mainstream media coverage was in The New York Times on 20 September 2001. In the first year of its existence, more than 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created – a rate exceeding 1,500 articles per month. Today, there are Wikipedia editions in more than 200 languages, accompanied by a dozen additional free-content projects, such as Wikimedia Commons. In March 2006, the English Wikipedia reached one million articles. According to Alexa, Wikipedia is currently the world's sixth most popular website, receiving approximately eight billion pageviews per month. We reached five million articles on 1 November 2015.

A work in progress

While Wikipedia is an incredible success, it remains a work in progress. There are still great gaps in its coverage with millions of important topics missing from its pages. Many articles – even vital ones – are not yet considered high-quality. Of our five million articles, only a few tens of thousands have passed a vetting process for good or featured status, and more than half are short stubs or start-class articles. There are also more than 200 non-English-language editions of Wikipedia that need volunteers. In other words, there is still much work to be done – and you can help!

How you can help

Video of Wikipedians from around the world who contribute to a variety of Wikipedia's language editions

Wikipedia is written by the people who use it. Anyone, regardless of background, can contribute to building the encyclopedia. You don't even have to register an account (though there are good reasons to do so). If you find an article you can improve, edit the article to make it more accurate and useful for others. Each page contains edit buttons for you to make those changes immediately. Any improvement, whether it's fixing a typo or drafting a brand new article, is greatly appreciated.

Wikipedia values boldness and the pursuit of consensus. Don't be afraid or disillusioned if your first contributions are undone – Wikipedia is a collaborative project, which means that sometimes we disagree. That's okay. Each page on Wikipedia has a talk page dedicated to discussing improvements, and fellow editors have a talk page where you can contact them individually.

Welcome

If you're new here, firstly: welcome. We sincerely hope you like it here and decide to stay. Below are some helpful links to get you started:

Five pillars of Wikipedia – the fundamental principles that guide our decision-making
Research help – Strategies for utilizing Wikipedia's knowledge
Tutorial – a simple nine-page guide on the basics of Wikipedia editing
The Wikipedia Adventure – an interactive one-hour tour that will help you engage in the basics of editing
Contributing to Wikipedia – a one-hour comprehensive outline of the basics of contributing

If you want to find an article to improve, here are some pointers and areas to contribute:

Wikipedia:Community portal – collaborations, tasks, and news about the English Wikipedia
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory – A directory of WikiProjects, which are groups of editors working to improve articles within each project's scope
Wikipedia:Vital articles – Topics on which the English Wikipedia should have corresponding high-quality articles
This week's article for improvement is Architect

If you get stuck, a variety of resources are available to assist you. The page Wikipedia:Questions lists locations where you can ask for help. The most valuable assets, however, are your fellow Wikipedians. If you have any questions about editing Wikipedia, friendly Wikipedians at the Teahouse will be more than happy to provide answers. You can also meet Wikipedians in person in many places around the world; see Wikipedia:Meetup for more information.

If you are already a Wikipedian, thank you for your contributions. We hope you continue to contribute to this amazing compendium of human knowledge.

Sincerely,
The Wikipedia community

The Wikimania international conference at
Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 2013
Wikimedia Australia presentation for the Australian Library and Information Association, 2014
Wikimedia UK tour of the Royal Greenwich Observatory at the National Maritime Museum, 2015
Wikimedia India meetup in Bangalore, 2015
WikiConference USA in Washington, D.C. at the U.S. National Archives building, 2015

Press contacts

Members of the press may contact the following for comments:

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In this issue

28 October 2015 (all comments)

Discuss this story

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Congratulations, Wikipedia! There have been many ups-and-downs, but the encyclopedia has pushed on to reach the golden 5 million article mark. May Wikipedia continue to be around to serve future generations for decades to come. --I am k6ka ^{Talk to me!} _{See what I have done} 18:23, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- And congratulations to Mark E, the winner of the Wikipedia:Five-million pool, for his prediction, made in 2007. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:01, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  - If you've contributed articles, you get your own mini-celebration, by adding a template to your user page, that calculates the percentage of articles that are yours :) --Djembayz (talk) 19:19, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Time to celebrate with more TLC all around! (tender loving care) ...

Any thoughts or tips on how we scale up to curating and maintaining all these articles?

Here are a few:

If you are a careful and patient person, the Page Curation tool may be worth trying out, as it's one of the first lines of defense on quality control.
A little-known asset is this page of cleanup listings. If you activate Visual Editor, you can zoom through these listings adding wikilinks and reference cleanup. (Don't throw tomatoes at me until you give it a try!) You'll find that there are Wikiprojects such as African countries that don't have anyone working cleanup, so your contribution can be truly significant.
De-orphaning by WikiProject can be quite gratifying too. (Here's how to de-orphan).
There used to be a really neat display of articles ranked by quality and page views over on the Toolserver. You could decide whether you wanted to go for high-traffic, unknown and unassessed, or middle-of-the-road articles. Anybody know where to find it these days? --Djembayz (talk) 19:19, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

We also have a "copy and paste" detection bot that runs on all new edits to En WP and lists potentially concerning edits [1]. It is correct about half the time and like everything is a work in progress. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:56, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Djembayz: The quality assessment is at https://tools.wmflabs.org/enwp10/cgi-bin/pindex.fcgi . Didn't know about the Bambots cleanup listing! Thanks! Will definitely clean up the Novels orphans in my volunteer time. Sadads (talk) 16:57, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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