Wikipedia:Announcements March 2001

Announcements for March 2001

March 30, 2001

Slashdotted again! (http://slashdot.org/articles/01/03/29/2035230.shtml) 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!