Wikipedia:Announcements August 2001

Announcements for 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 (http://www.thaistarnet.com/Thai-KLM/Kejmanee03.htm) 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 (http://de.wikipedia.com) now has over 1,000 pages! Ausgezeichnet!

August 15, 2001

You can now get the code and data for the Wikipedia wikis here (http://www.wikipedia.com/tarballs) (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.