Wikipedia:Announcements July 2001

Announcements for 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 (http://slashdot.org/articles/01/07/26/0312258.shtml). 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 (http://www.kuro5hin.org/hotlist/add/2001/7/25/103136/121/displaystory). 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 (http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010718/tc/britannica_fees_2) 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 (http://chalkboard.nupedia.com/wiki.cgi?Nupedia/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 (http://chalkboard.nupedia.com). 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 (http://www.search.com/search?channel=19&cat=63).

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