Wikipedia:Milestones/2003

December 2003

December 31

• The Romanian Wikipedia has 3000 articles.
• Wikimedia's account balances are now being tracked at http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising

December 30

• Databases have been recovered on a temporary server after a double hardware failure. There may be some remaining problems on some wikis, and mailing list signup isn't fixed up yet.
• The Wikimedia Foundation raised a chunk of cash in a recent fund drive to help pay for additional redundant servers to prevent future outages; thanks to everyone who contributed!

December 29

• RAM and HDD failures result in the wiki being closed, all day long...

December 28, 2003

• The Finnish Wikipedia has 3,000 articles.
• Wikipedia has been temporarily moved back to the old database server while the new one is checked for errors. (Tests so far indicate RAM problems and/or operating system bugs.) Fulltext search has been disabled to reduce server load for the duration; hopefully this won't be more than a few days.

December 26, 2003

• The Wikipedia is back online after an extended outage caused by a crash of the main database server on Christmas Day. Partial service was maintained over the database outage by using the locally cached copies of pages on the page servers.

December 21, 2003

• The Italian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.

December 15, 2003

• According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia.org has surpassed Slashdot for the last several days straight. [1] This should reduce the relative effect of future Slashdottings. NOTE: Slashdot.org still is more popular according to its 3-month average.
• The page Wikipedia:Modelling Wikipedia's growth has been updated: it looks like the exponential growth assumption still holds for the en: Wikipedia.

December 14, 2003

• The Corsican Wikipedia has been started. We have a somewhat enhanced list of proverbs. English translations of these proverbs are very welcome.
• A new set of TomeRaider files has been released, for browsing Wikipedia offline on a handheld device (PPC, Palm or EPOC) or Windows PC. See TomeRaider database.

December 12, 2003

• Wiktionary is one year old, and now has more than 30,000 entries.

December 11, 2003

• Italian Wikipedia has been switched from Usemod to MediaWiki software.

December 10, 2003

• During the night between the 9th and the 10th of December, the French Wikipedia logo was briefly changed to a Christmas-themed version. (The customary logo is currently in place.) Read more...
• Swedish Wikipedia reaches 18000 articles.

December 9, 2003

• The search function is back online.

(You can always search Wikipedia with Google by adding "site:wikipedia.org" into your search terms on google.com, if you're nostalgic.)

• The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 50 articles.

December 8, 2003

• The 3-month average Alexa rank of Wikipedia.org breaks the 1,000 barrier, [2]; Wikipedia.org is now more clearly within the top 1,000 websites that Alexa tracks. Wikipedia has had more traffic than Britannica, during the past two (or three) months. [3]
• The English language Wikipedia has reached 180,000 articles. The latest 10,000 articles have been produced since the English Wikipedia hit 170,000 articles on Nov 4, 34 days ago.

December 7, 2003

• The German Wikipedia has reached 40,000 articles. If growth continues this month as it did in the first week, it might also surpass the English Wikipedia in number of new articles per month (the only other time that another Wikipedia got more new articles in a month than the English did, was when an existing dictionary was mass-imported into the Danish Wikipedia in February).

December 6, 2003

• The MediaWiki namespace, a new MediaWiki feature for interface translation and customisation, has been switched on.
• The English Wikipedia reached 2,000,000 edits since the software was upgraded in July 2002. This has been done in the 6 months since 1,000,000 edits were reached on June 3, 2003.

December 5, 2003

• The Esperanto Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles. This makes 10 Wikipedias with over 10,000 articles; these 10 Wikipedias have been clearly larger than the rest since February this year. The next-largest Wikipedias are Catalonian and Italian, both of which have slightly over 5,000 articles and are still running on the Usemod software.
• The Hebrew Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.

December 4, 2003

• The MySQL installation on the new Wikimedia database server is having some problems. [4] This seems to be resolved[5], but keep an eye out.

December 3, 2003

• The new monster database server has now been installed, and all the MediaWiki-based languages of the Wikipedia are now running on it.
• The Danish Wikipedia has reached 14,000 articles.

November 2003

November 29, 2003

• WikiProject Fictional Series launched. Please visit to make comments on organising fictional series.

November 25, 2003

• The new monster database server has been delivered.

"It's a girl!"

November 24, 2003

• Wikipedia is going through some software upgrades today, which hopefully will not be too disruptive...

November 22, 2003

• The Wikipedia Typo Department is launched.
• The French language Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles.

November 21, 2003

• Wiktionary has had a few short bursts in alexa ranking: [6]

• The English language Wikipedia has reached 175,000 articles. 25,000 articles have been created in the last three months, since the 150,000th article was written on August 19th.

November 12, 2003

• The Dutch Wikipedia has reached 15 000 articles.

November 8, 2003

• The new load-balancing code has greatly improved responsiveness, and the Alexa daily traffic rank is improving again.

November 5, 2003

• Some simple load balancing has been set up bouncing between 'en.wikipedia.org' and 'en2.wikipedia.org'; this should help reduce server strain at peak hours. Login sessions should transfer cleanly between the two.

• A Wikipedia article is linked from one word in a Slashdot article. [7] Since Wikipedia is not the focus of the article, we are not truly "Slashdotted" . Nevertheless, the Volunteer Fire Department should go into action to help possible newcomers.

November 4, 2003

• The English language Wikipedia has reached 170,000 articles. The latest 10,000 articles have been produced since the English Wikipedia hit 160,000 articles on Sept 26, 40 days ago.
• The Spanish Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.

October 2003

October 26, 2003

• The Romanian Wikipedia and the Hebrew Wikipedia both reach 1,000 articles. Now we have Wikipedias in 20 languages that have over 1,000 articles! 8 of these have over 10,000 articles. (See Multilingual statistics)

October 22, 2003

• Frisian Wikipedia has been switched from phase 1 to phase 3 software. The method used for the switch is incomplete and requires some corrections afterward. Because of this, it is currently only suitable for small Wikipedias.

October 20, 2003

• Swedish Wikipedia reaches 15,000 articles.
• Czech Wikipedia reaches 1,000 articles.
• According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia is now, at peak load, within the 800 most popular websites. The wiki's userbase has increased 119% (since July), and the average user views 22% more pages. Wikipedia traffic is now limited by the fact that the servers are severely overloaded: the new server on order should allow Wikipedia traffic to increase substantially.

October 17, 2003

• Recentchanges summary is created. The page is a place to summarize the recent changes.

October 15, 2003

• Should links on Wikipedia be underlined by default or not? Cast your vote on Meta-Wikipedia: Link style vote

October 14, 2003

• The web server for the English Wikipedia, "larousse", is back online. Expect some more downtime for hardware work in the next day or so.
• A portion of traffic to "www.wikipedia.org" will be diverted to "en2.wikipedia.org", while most of it will go to "en.wikipedia.org", where all logins will be directed. Until the server configuration is more stable and transparent load-sharing is set up, this should help share some of the traffic without burdening the other wikis too greatly.

October 13, 2003

• Give your feedback on the new logo. Vote for your favorite variant.

October 11, 2003

• For the first time in its history there are now fewer articles in the English Wikipedia than in all other language Wikipedias combined.

Even if one does not count the very tiniest Wikipedias into the mix, there are 164 128 articles when non English wikipedias are summed up. In the English Wikipedia there are "only" 163 904 articles.

For more language specific statistics, see Wikipedia:Multilingual statistics.

October 6, 2003

• Wikipedia:Cleanup is open for business

The Wikipedia:Cleanup page is a buffer designed by Cimon Avaro, Stevertigo and others to take the load off of Wikipedia:Votes for deletion, which gets overused (up to 90k this week!). Descriptions and each listing's "life" on WP:CU are to be kept very short, allowing for rapid 'first handling' of a large number of articles, like Special:Recentchanges but with a solicitation for immediate community assistance in determining/validating the article's path.

October 5/6, 2003

• Software problems caused the database server to be unavailable for much of the day. As a result, pages could not be edited and some pages (those of which no cached copies existed) could not be viewed. The current situation is that our two servers are both having problems.

Pliny, our main server which hosts the webserver for the non-English Wikipedia and all the databases, crashes irregularly; the causes of these crashes are unknown (likely a hardware problem). During upgrades, Pliny was left in a state where a post-crash reboot would not bring up the database server again, which caused today's downtime.

Our second server, Larousse, has recently been upgraded but is currently completely unavailable -- for all we know, the server might have caught on fire. Jason from Bomis will drive to the server location to verify the server's state.

The good news is that once both our servers are up and running reliably again, things should get significantly faster. So please bear with us as we address these problems, and be sure to make a donation to the Wikimedia Foundation if you haven't already so that we can keep up with ever-increasing traffic. (see Wikipedia:Donations, and also Brion's notebook fund. Brion Vibber spends much of his time administering Wikipedia's servers with no direct compensation from Wikimedia or Bomis.)

October 4, 2003

• The upgraded web server has crashed and we haven't been able to get it back online yet. Have switched the database server to cover www.wikipedia.org until it's back up.

October 3, 2003

• The web server for www.wikipedia.org has been upgraded from a Pentium III 866MHz to a dual Athlon MP 2800 system. Some more upgrades (memory, CPUs for the database/other web server too) will follow over the next few days.
• Note to those who have been using en2.wikipedia.org: new uploads have been switched back to www.wikipedia.org, and logins are no longer forced to redirect to en2.

October 1, 2003

• We now have over 300,000 articles in our MediaWiki Wikipedia versions (over 320,000 counting the UseMod Wikipedias). This is a truly remarkable milestone given where most of the growth has occurred - outside of the English version. In fact, counting the UseMod wikis, there are now as many articles in all other languages combined as there are in English! Soon Wikipedia will not have any one language with a majority of the articles. Official distribution of Wikimedia's first press release, however, is being delayed until much needed server upgrades can be performed.

• All Wikipedias have ratified the new logo. New variations are available for comment.

• Over the last month, there has been a substantial increase in public awareness of Wikipedia, as measured by increases of mentions of Wikipedia in Usenet traffic, incoming links, as well as greatly increased Web traffic and reach.

September 2003

September 30, 2003

• Wikipedia has reached an agreement with EUobserver, an independent news site which reports about issues related to the European Union. The deal in two sentences: We can use the story summaries from their frontpage as public domain materials, in return we provide links to the full text of the stories on the EUobserver website. This agreement is primarily of interest for our current events page. Since we already have a policy to link to sources for all stories reported there, this agreement does not result in special status to EU Observer stories. See Wikipedia:EUobserver cooperation for details.

• The Slovenian Wikipedia has reached 1000 articles.

September 26, 2003

• The English Wikipedia has reached 160,000 articles. The last 10,000 articles were produced since the English Wikipedia hit 150,000 articles on Aug 19, 39 days ago.

September 25, 2003

• Wikipedia has a new logo! See m:International logo vote/Results for details, and help to refine the new logo by joining the discussion. Each Wikipedia can choose on its own whether it wants to use the new logo or not. This vote will last until October 1 and is on m:International logo vote/Ratification. Please participate.

September 24, 2003

• Wikimedia's donation page is now live at: http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising
• Due to heavy load on the web server, logins on the English-language Wikipedia are temporarily being redirected to the database/other web server as en2.wikipedia.org to help balance out the load. Images uploaded there won't immediately show up on www.wikipedia.org, but will be copied/synchronized later.

September 21, 2003

• The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.

September 17, 2003

• The Polish Wikipedia reached 15000 articles.

September 15, 2003

• 2. round of International logo vote started. See vote

September 13, 2003

• The server hosting some of the language Wikipedias on the older software on *.wikipedia.com has recently died. They have been transferred to *.wikipedia.org and are up and running at that address. .com addresses will become redirects to the new locations at some point, but at the moment are dead-ends; please update any links.

September 11, 2003

• Wiktionary has reached 5,000 entries.

September 9, 2003

• The Japanese Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles.

September 7, 2003

• Wikipedia breaks the 1000 mark for rank of traffic according to Alexa. The average user stays here to see about 5.6 pages, and we reach 855 of every million web users. See http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=wikipedia&url=http://www.wikipedia.org/ for more details.

September 6, 2003

• The vote for a new Wikipedia logo is now in stage 2. 11 logos made it to this stage. The proposed deadline for the second stage is September 15.

September 4, 2003

• Wikipedia's traffic ranking intersects that of Slashdot for the first time. [8]

September 3, 2003

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Cetaceans launched.

September 1, 2003

• The English Wikipedia now has entries for every bird and mammal order. Some orders have extensive articles and linked pages down to family and species level, many are illustrated with original photographs, others are still bald stubs. But as of today, we are no longer ploughing fresh ground: from here on we are improving and expanding what we already have. The bird pages are well advanced and should have descriptions complete down to family level within the next month or two.

August 2003

August 30, 2003

• According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia's traffic rank continues to rise, with the one-day traffic rank placing the Wikipedia on the verge of being a top-1000 site. See Wikipedia.org is more popular than...

August 27, 2003

• The first voting stage for a new Wikipedia logo has begun! Please pick your 10 favorite logos. The proposed deadline for the first stage is September 5.

August 23, 2003

• Please donate to the Wikimedia Foundation and help us buy a new server. We accept PayPal (major credit cards), or you could mail us a cheque (or check). See Wikipedia:Donations for details.

August 19, 2003

• The English Wikipedia reached 150,000 articles.

August 17, 2003

• New Wikipedia statistics available, designed by Erik Zachte

August 12, 2003

• Time magazine features Wikipedia in a sidebar article in the "Your Time: Technology" section of the August 18 issue, released today. An online version can be found at time.com.
• Belated announcement and call for participants for WikiProject Psychopathology and for WikiProject Universities

August 10, 2003

• A second hard drive has been installed in the database server. Spreading disk access over two disks may help with performance. Even if it doesn't, it sure beats running out of disk space!

August 5th, 2003

• Following CNN's coverage of Wikipedia, the one-day traffic rank reported by alexa.com has risen to 1057, putting Wikipedia just on the edge of entering the top 1000 websites. Given that Wikipedia currently just uses two standard PCs as servers (one webserver and one database server), and that it is one of the most dynamic websites in existence, this is also a testament to the performance of the open-source software running the website. Like Wikipedia itself, the Wikipedia software is developed and maintained by volunteers.

• Wikipedia in French has reached 15,000 articles.

August 4th, 2003

• Wikimedia's first press release is being worked on right now and will be released as soon as the whole project (all language versions) hits the 300,000 article milestone. Together with this announcement, a Wikimedia fundraising drive will be started to help fund the operation and maintenance of the website.
• Wikipedia is the subject of an article in CNN.com's Technology section. The article mostly concentrates on participation of Hong Kong students. See "Wikipedia: The know-it-all Web site".

August 3rd, 2003

• Wikipedia in Dutch has reached 10 000 articles.
• wikipedia.org has, according to alexa.com, now consistently exceeded the traffic ranking of britannica.com for an entire month: see graph

July 2003

July 29th, 2003

• Wikipedia's database server (also known as pliny) needed to be rebooted after Wikipedia was down for more than a few hours. The cause of the crash is still unknown.
• A table of contents scheme has been implemented after demonstrations on http://test.wikipedia.org/. Turn off the table of contents for a page by inserting __NOTOC__ anywhere on it. You can link to an individual section on a page by using the syntax [[pagename#section title]].
• Individual sections can now be edited. Check your user preferences -- section editing can be turned off, or if you use a modern browser, you can edit sections by right clicking their titles instead of the [edit] links.
• The layout has been slightly modified. Pages with lots of links should save faster. Talk pages now have a "Post a comment" link.
• The title search is currently disabled for performance reasons. Use the "Go" button instead.
• You can now choose your preferred date format. --(Discuss)
• Sysops can no longer query the live database for server-performance reasons. A backup database can be found at http://download.wikipedia.org/.

July 27th, 2003

The German Wikipedia http://de.wikipedia.org has reached an article count of 25.000 today. Note that the article count was boosted recently by a software update which implements the new article count methodology.

July 25th, 2003

• Wikipedia in Spanish has reached 5,000 articles.
• Two years ago, Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, wrote an article in kuro5hin. In it he predicted that Wikipedia might have 84,000 articles in 7 years. However, only two years later Wikipedia has more than double that (when including the international wikis).

July 21st, 2003

• National Public Radio in the United States has run a story on how Wikis are being used on the Internet and within corporations to collaboratively create documents. There is a very prominent mention of Wikipedia in this story (in fact about half the segment is about Wikipedia). Please email this link to your boss and co-workers!

July 20th, 2003

• An international logo contest is launched on Meta-Wikipedia. All artists are encouraged to participate.
• Vastly improved custom software was installed on the English version of Wikipedia one year ago today. Since that time there have been over 55 million page views, over 1.2 million page edits and well over 100,000 new articles added. That comes out to an average of 150,000 views, 3,300 edits and 275 articles a day. And that is just for the English version!

July 19th, 2003

Erik Zachte provides interesting statistics for several Wikipedias. Update July 28th: now reports for 10 Wikipedias in 3 languages, including cross Wikipedia comparisons on 13 criteria.

July 16th, 2003

Wiktionary has reached 4 000 entries.

July 10th, 2003

Wikipedia Textbook now has its own site: http://textbook.wikipedia.org and Wikiquote (whose name may change later) now has its own site: http://quote.wikipedia.org

July 8th, 2003

The English Wikipedia reached 140,000 articles, and the Swedish Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles!

July 7th, 2003

Wikipedia receives its highest ever traffic peak, ranking 1,441 on alexa.com's daily traffic rank rating, prompted by recent publicity for the German Wikipedia (English auto-translation).

July 4th, 2003

The German Wikipedia http://de.wikipedia.org has reached an article count of 20.000 this night.

June 2003

June 20, 2003

The existence of the Wikimedia Foundation has been officially announced by Jimbo Wales. [9] This is a nonprofit corporation organized under the laws of Florida, United States which is now the parent organization of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, the Sep11wiki, and the soon to be created (and yet unnamed) TextbookWiki project (see m:Talk:Science Hypertextbook project and [10]). It will, however, be some time before the Foundation will be fully operational and able to accept donations and grants.

June 19, 2003

Wikipedia is currently upgrading to "version 1.2 or later" of the GFDL. See Wikipedia:GFDL upgrade for a quick lowdown, or to ask questions.

June 15, 2003

For those who like to edit articles offline with a text editor, a new syntax highlighting file has been released for the popular open-source editor Vim. See Wikipedia:Syntax highlighting.

June 11, 2003

New analysis in Wikipedia:Modelling Wikipedia's growth suggests that the English-language Wikipedia may actually be following the quasi-exponential growth model predicted and hoped for back in 2001. If this trend is real, a crude numerical model predicts that the English-language Wikipedia will pass the 1 million article mark in mid 2008. A clear test of this hypothesis should be available next year, when the model predicts a sharp divergence from linear growth.

June 10, 2003

Sun Microsystems starts Javapedia, a wiki encyclopaedia on Java, stating:

"Inspiration: the Wikipedia

Our model is the Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia being constructed online by volunteers". [11]

The concept of wikipedia is spreading into the corporate world ...

June 8, 2003

Software changes:

1. There is a new feature called "oldest articles" (colloq. "ancient pages"). Currently this inevitably lists first all the imported articles from the phase I software that have not been edited yet ever since. Hopefully, as these become updated, this feature will allow us to systematically go through our old material and make sure it is in good shape and up to date.
2. Sysops will note that the page deletion feature now auto-pastes the content of pages that are smaller than 500 bytes into the deletion comment (only the first 150 characters). It also does so if the current revision is blanked and the previous revision contains text that can be pasted. The deletion feature now indicates if you are about to delete a page that has a history.
3. The page Wikipedia:Book sources is now used to generate the list of booksellers/catalogs when a user clicks on an ISBN number. This should make it possible to create such a list collaboratively, written from a neutral point of view.
4. It is now possible to link to an article history using [[PageHistory:Page name]] (e.g. PageHistory:Main Page), to a contributions list using [[UserContributions:User name]] (e.g. UserContributions:Rambot), and to a list of pages that link to a page using [[BackLinks:Page name]] (e.g. BackLinks:Fair use).
5. Cached pages sent to visitors who aren't logged in are now sent compressed if the browser supports it; this will lower Wikipedia's bandwidth usage a bit, and moderately speed page loads for people with slower connections. There may be incompatibilities with some browsers! Anyone having trouble with receiving garbage characters instead of nice web pages, please contact the development mailing list with the exact browser version you're using.

More...

June 7,2003

Wikipedia in Irish has just started.

June 5, 2003

Swedish Wikipedia Main Page get a new updated layout.

June 3, 2003

The English Wikipedia reaches 1,000,000 page edits since the software was upgraded on July 20, 2002.

June 1, 2003

Some members of two Delphi Forums have volunteered to let Wikipedia to use nearly 90 of their personal photos on flowers: Wikipedia:Plant photo collection I.

The English Wikipedia reached 130,000 articles (using the new criterion chosen by a project-wide vote that only articles containing at least one internal link are counted).

May 2003

May 29, 2003

On Monday, June 9 at 7:00pm (your local time), there might be a Wikipedia Meetup in a city near you. Go to http://wikipedia.meetup.com/ for more details.

May 28, 2003

Alexa.com shows another major Wikipedia traffic spike, in the highest traffic rank yet recorded by Alexa for Wikipedia, with Wikipedia momentarily almost touching the top 2000 rank. Wikipedia.org has now for several days achieved a higher traffic rank than Britannica.com, so it looks like we succeeded in one aspect of our goal of "beating Britannica"! (Type britannica.com after "Compare: wikipedia.org vs.") [12]

May 22, 2003

According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia has momentarily entered their list of the top 3000 highest traffic sites on the Web. [13] Wikipedia traffic continues to rise, and the new server performance remains stable.

The Polish Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles

May 17, 2003

An oft-requested change, the edit preview display now will show above the edit box by default. Existing user accounts may wish to change their settings (Special:Preferences); new accounts and anonymous contributors will see the new behavior automatically.

May 16, 2003

The French Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles.

After some delays and birthing pains, the English-language 'pedia is now running on the new web server, giving the database (and the other languages!) some breathing room. Please see Wikipedia:New server madness to report any troubles.

May 13, 2003

The English-language Wikipedia will be switched over to use the new web server at 6:00 UTC, Wednesday 14 May 2003. (11pm US Pacific, 2am US Eastern, 7am UK, 8am Europe; others check your timezone). It may take a few hours for the DNS change to propagate through the internet; during the changeover if you find yourself still attached to the old machine you will be temporarily unable to upload files or see some newly uploaded images, but should still be able to read and edit wiki pages. The new server's ip address is 130.94.122.199

May 11, 2003

The German Wikipedia reached 15,000 articles. The English Wikipedia has increased by 20% since January 2003 to 120,000 articles.

At May 7 the English Wikipedia contained 126444 'articles' in a wider sense than above (counting all namespace 0 records, except redirect pages (404120), not counting other namespaces (meta info like discussion pages). 1915744 hyperlinks existed between these articles.

May 10, 2003

Congratulations! You just received 100 WikiDollars (also known as WikiEuros) and are free to spend them immediately. See Wikipedia:WikiMoney for the details.

May 9, 2003

The main server crashed again this morning (USA) and was down for a few hours; we will be investigating possible hardware problems tomorrow. The new server is being configured so it will be able to provide a read-only mirror of Wikipedia on future occasions of downtime on the database server.

April 2003

April 30

A Low Saxon Wikipedia has been erected at http://za.wikipedia.com It should be moved to http://pd.wikipedia.com since that is the right place, but currently unavailable.

A new database server for Wikipedia will be set up on Friday/Saturday, May 2/3, which should reduce general sluggishness and allow for nice things like search to work again. Expect downtime while things are reconfigured...

April 18

Wikipedia meetups are planned for Monday, May 12, at 7pm. They take place in many cities around the world. You can sign up at http://wikipedia.meetup.com

April 17

Erik Zachte has prepared versions of the English, German and Dutch Wikipedias in TomeRaider format for offline browsing on handheld devices (Pocket PC, Palm, EPOC) or Windows PC. See Wikipedia:TomeRaider database.

April 14

According to the Statistics page, the English version of Wikipedia features over 200,000 pages in the database including talk pages, user pages, help pages etc (200,034 to be exact), vs. around 114,744 "legitimate articles". This gives us a page to article ratio of approx. 57.36%.

March 2003

March 16, 2003

• The Welsh Wikipedia has now been started: cy.wikipedia.com

March 11, 2003

• Ĝangalo, the largest Esperanto-language web portal, has an article about Wikipedia.

March 7, 2003

• A crude estimate shows that the English-language Wikipedia now has approximately 72,000 non-gazeteer articles. Using the earlier estimated article average of 332 words, the English-language Wikipedia's size can be estimated as approximately 23.9 million words, roughly half the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica's 2002 edition. Can anyone give a more accurate size estimate?

February 2003

February 26, 2003

• Enciclopedia Libre, the fork of http://es.wikipedia.org is one year old today.

February 22, 2003

• Help Wikipedia find a mascot!

February 19, 2003

• The Lithuanian Wikipedia has now been started, Lithuanian Wikipedia

February 10, 2003

• The database has been reorganized, which required a few hours of downtime. Thanks to the reorganization, page histories, contribution lists and the random page feature should now be a lot faster. See the wikitech-l mailing list for details, and subscribe if you want to help with further MySQL optimizations to speed up Wikipedia!
• SearchDay - a search engine news mailing list - has a feature article about us here.

February 3, 2003

• The following 1/8-page ad was published on the back cover of the Pasporta Servo 2003, the best distributed book annually in Esperanto, which should reach 1600 active Esperanto speakers:

File:Eo-ps.jpg

January 2003

January 30, 2003

The Guardian has an article about us. The online version is here: Common Knowledge

January 28, 2003

Wired News has an article about us here.

January 24, 2003

Distributed Proofreaders is currently working on the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. Head over to their website and give them a hand!

January 22, 2003

Well we asked for it and it is here yet again: Wikipedia is being Slashdotted. See [14] Call out the Wikipedia:Volunteer Fire Department - you know the drill.

January 21, 2003

We reached 100,000 articles! Please help distribute our 2003 Press Release.

January 17, 2003

In an interview on NPR's "Talk of the Nation - Science Friday", Bruce Perens made a special point of referencing Wikipedia as an example of an OpenSource project.

January 16, 2003

A press release is being prepared for publication when the English Wikipedia hits the 100,000 article milestone. Please help us finish this before it is submitted to news organizations. See: Wikipedia:2003 Press Release.

January 15, 2003

With well over 130,000 articles spread across 28 languages, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, turns 2 years old today. Several Wikipedia contributors (Wikipedians), in the collaborative spirit which has brought us so far, have redesigned the Main Page for the English Wikipedia in celebration of Wikipedia's birthday.

During the first year of its existence, Wikipedia went from zero to 20,000 articles in the English version and that was considered to be an impressive growth rate. The second year of Wikipedia saw the addition of nearly 80,000 more articles in the English version alone, making it the world's largest Wiki and the world's largest free content encyclopedia. With edits being made 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by hundreds of bright and enthusiastic volunteers from around the world, who knows where we will be one year from today?

Our original goal was to make 100,000 articles, and at the time we speculated that this might take us five or more years. We now know that the 100,000 article milestone is just the tip of the iceberg. The power of the collaborative WikiWiki editing model, the freedom that the GNU Free Documentation License gives us, and our strong nonbias policy (the neutral point of view), combined with our goal of creating the world's largest encyclopedia will ensure the continued growth and success of our project.

Many people have told us that we would fail. "What?" they said, "You let anyone edit anytime they wish? It is preposterous to think that anything of any value could be created that way. You are destined to fail!" It is, however, becoming more and more apparent with each passing day that they are wrong. Let's celebrate Wikipedia Day by continuing to build the world's best encyclopedia!

A press release is being prepared for publication when the English version of Wikipedia (the oldest one) hits the 100,000 article milestone.

January 10, 2003

Sometime early Friday morning the Main Page registered one million page views. The counter was started on August 25.

January 9, 2003

First Monday mentions Wikipedia in their article The Institutional Design of Open Source Programming as an example of OpenSource-like non-programming cases.

Lars Aronsson presented a paper about his Wiki susning.nu at a conference on electronic publishing. The article also contains an introduction to the Wiki concept and describes Wikipedia as a prominent example.

January 7, 2003

Wikipedia has vanished from Google's listings, except for page titles alone. This appears to have been caused by an error in the robots.txt file, and should be fixed the next time Google spiders Wikipedia.

January 6, 2003

Inline TeX math formulas are now supported. By default, simple formulas are turned into plain HTML, while complex ones are rendered as images (logged-in users can tweak the math rendering settings in their preferences). See Wikipedia:TeX markup for more.