Wikipedia:Milestones/2005

December 2005

December 29

• The Asian edition of Reader's Digest (http://rdasia.com) has an article about Wikipedia on pages 97 - 100 entitled "The New Know-It-All". Among other topics, it discusses the threat posed to traditional encyclopaedias.

December 22

• The Wikipedia:Semi-protection policy code has been installed. Pages can now be protected from edits from IPs and from users whose accounts are less than four days old.

December 20

• Wikipedia:Semi-protection policy becomes official but software is not yet implemented.
• Stewards elections for 2006 from December 20th, 2005 to January 10th, 2006.
• Nielson/NetRatings reports (PDF) that Wikipedia, with 17,642,000 unique visitors in November 2005 for a 291% year over year growth rate, is the 7th fastest growing "web brand" with at least one million unique visitors.

December 19

• Wikipedia's one day Alexa traffic rank hit a record high of 23 today.

December 14

• A special report in the scientific journal Nature [1] has compared Wikipedia's science coverage with that of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The article is headlined "Internet encyclopaedias go head to head; Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds." The study shows that Wikipedia is less accurate than the Britannica, but only by a small margin.

December 13

• Wikipedia's daily Alexa rank hit 27 today, probably helped by recent press coverage.

December 11

• Our next fund drive will be held from Friday 16 December to Friday 6 January. Translations are being coordinated at: meta:Fund drives/2005/Q4 planning/Translations.
• Our one-day Alexa ranking hit 29 today, putting us in the psychologically important top 30 for the first time.

December 6

Our one-day Alexa ranking has hit 30 for the first time ever.

December 5

Anonymous page creation was disabled on the English Wikipedia on an experimental basis. Talk page creation is not affected. For more details, see Experiment on new pages.

November 2005

November 26

Jimbo has announced he will hand-pick new ArbCom candidates rather than have an open election for them, then have the public vote on his selections, with 50% support required to pass. See Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2005/Straw poll.

November 22

Nielsen/NetRatings announced its list for Top 10 Online News & Information Destinations; Wikipedia is #8. [2] (Wikipedia is the first open citizen-powered site to crack the top ten, says Steve Rubel. [3])

November 1

• We have reached 800,000 articles in the English Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia is now among the Top 40 most popular sites on the web. According to Alexa Internet our three-month averaged rank has hit a new record of 38.

October 2005

October 24

• The article on Haute couture was panned in the Guardian by Alexandra Shulman, the editor of the British edition of Vogue, who gave it a score of 0/10 [4]. This article is in desperate need of expert attention. Haute couture needs your help! Please help fix its inadequacies, and polish it until it can become a featured article candidate.
• In a press release on October 20, Answers.com announced a new partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation. Answers.com will launch a Wikipedia Edition of their popular 1-Click Answers software. Advertising revenues from this service will be shared with the Wikimedia Foundation. See Wikipedia:Tools/1-Click Answers.

October 6

• Our daily Alexa Internet traffic rank has hit a new record of 31.

September 2005

September 30

• Wikipedia's daily Alexa Internet traffic rank has recovered from its brief drop to a new record of 35, while the weekly traffic rank has entered the top forty for the first time.

September 29

• We have reached 750,000 articles in the English Wikipedia.

September 26

• Although Wikipedia's global traffic has risen substantially [5] in the last week with the addition of new servers, Wikipedia's daily Alexa Internet traffic rank [6] has fallen significantly over the same period, to 47.

September 20

• Wikipedia's daily Alexa Internet rank has reached a new record of thirty-six.

September 15

• The first Squid servers in Seoul are now live, and serving traffic to several Asian countries. [7].

September 14

• The new Yahoo!-hosted server farm in Seoul [yaseo] is now in the process of being commissioned by Wikimedia's tireless developer team. [8] When up and running, this will be the Wikimedia Foundation's fourth active server farm, adding to the current server farms in Tampa, Paris, and Amsterdam.

September 6

• Wikipedia's daily Alexa traffic rank reaches #39, breaking into the top 40 for the first time.

September 5

• The Wikimedia Foundation's Q3 2005 fundraising drive breaks through its target of $200,000

September 3

• Across all Wikimedia projects and languages, the largest of which is the English-language Wikipedia, the Wikimedia servers are now serving approximately 200 million requests per day on the busiest day of each week. (source) According to Alexa, 66% of wikipedia.org traffic goes to the English Wikipedia, and, again according to Alexa, traffic for other Wikimedia projects is tiny compared to that for Wikipedia, so if we assume that (say) 95% of all Wikimedia goes to Wikipedia, and 66% of that to the English Wikipedia, that represents 125 million requests per day for the English Wikipedia.

September 1

• Another record-breaking month has just ended. The Wikipedia project gained more than 185,000 new articles in August, over 49,000 of them in English. New records were also broken by a multitude of other language versions, including the German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and Chinese Wikipedias, and Swedish became the fifth six-figure Wikipedia project. Statistics will be uploaded here over the weekend, if not before.

August 2005

August 30

The Wikipedia foundation has put out an order for twenty more servers today.

August 29

• Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion is a new page dealing with the deletion of pages in the Wikipedia, Help, Portal and User namespaces, and any other future namespaces. The shortcut is WP:MFD.

August 27

• A Portal: namespace is created for reader-oriented Portals - see WP:PORTAL. Reader and editor-oriented Portals will remain at Wikipedia:Wikiportals.

August 25

• The English Wikipedia passes 700,000 articles, around 06:32 UTC.

August 24

• Wikipedia's Alexa traffic rank has reached a new high, with a weekly rating of #44, and a one day hit of 41 last Saturday.

August 22

• The Wikipedia collaborations of the week have been discontinued in favour of one collaboration at this page instead of two. The decision was made due to little edits in last week's efforts: Winter and Horn of Africa.

August 14

• Wikipedia:Requests for comment has been split into several subpages by topic area (e.g. "history", "politics" etc). Editors are encouraged to put the subpage(s) on topic areas they are familiar with or interested in on their watchlist, so that they can be kept informed of any upcoming issues and conflicts in that area.

August 5

• Numerous news outlets are quoting a Reuters report that Jimmy Wales has stated that there will be a "freeze" on editing. Jimbo says that statements about methods for achieving the widely-discussed stable "Wikipedia 1.0" were misinterpreted as implying a project-wide lockdown. Wikipedia's open editing will continue for the foreseeable future, and any potential stabilized version would exist alongside the current system. Jimbo was last seen looking for the 'edit this page' link on the Reuters article.

August 3

• Jimmy Wales is blogging for Stanford University professor Lawrence Lessig on "Ten Things That Will Be Free". He will blog one item per day for ten days, and he wants your input on the last three.

August 1

• I haven't had time to upload the statistics yet, but the figures for July show that the English Wikipedia grew by more than 47,000 articles. This is an all-time record. The Wikipedia project as a whole grew by almost 160,000 articles, also a record.

July 2005

July 29

• The week of July 31-August 6 has been declared Wikification Week on Wikipedia! Pick an article of interest from one of hundreds available in Category:Articles that need to be wikified, and help us clear out the backlog, wiki wiki (very fast)! No special expertise required.

July 28

• The English wikipedia now has 20 million edits!
• Including redirects, discussion pages, image description pages, user profile pages, templates, help pages, articles without links to other articles, and pages about Wikipedia, the English wikipedia has 2 million pages!

July 27

• The English Wikipedia has now hit 10.00 average edits per page; see Special:Statistics.

July 26

• The Medicine Collaboration of the Fortnight has just been created. Anyone is welcome to participate!

July 22

• Wikipedia:Requested articles/Geographical regions has been created. Please help create articles for these regions, or create links to existing articles.
• Wikipedia joins the global top fifty websites for the first time: its one-week average Alexa traffic rank, at #50, enters the top fifty for the first time ever. See Alexa traffic data for Wikipedia.

July 19

• After a lengthy vote with substantial turnout, the criteria for speedy deletion have been broadened considerably. The Proposal Outcome adds four new criteria and rewords an existing one.

July 16

• Wikipedia:Requested templates has been created. Requested the template that you need if your knowledge in Wiki Syntax is limited.

July 11

• Wikipedia hits its highest ever one-day Alexa traffic rank, #48, rising above the #50 mark for the first time. See Alexa traffic data for Wikipedia, Wikipedia:Awareness statistics.

July 9

• A survey potentially affecting a large number of articles has been created. It questions whether articles should be allowed to contain the entire text of a whole bible chapter or not (i.e. does Wikipedia:Don't include copies of primary sources apply or not). The survey is at Wikipedia:Bible source text, and will end at 04:00 (UTC) on 22nd July 2005.

July 6

• A new Wikiproject has been created: WikiProject help desk. The goal is to bring people who need help with software that relates to Wikipedia and the seasoned computer people who can help them solve their problems together in one spot. There is already an open case: WikiProject help desk/20050702 Dmcdevit The tool that Dmcdevit uses to perform Transwikis has broken since the software upgrade.

July 4

• A new proposal to expand Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion was opened. Voting will close on July 19, 2005 15:11 (UTC).

July 1

• What a month it's been! The Wikipedia project, both in English and overall, broke all records in June. More than 138,000 new articles were added, over 36,500 of them in English. This breaks even the ancient records, dimly remembered by only a few geriatric Wikipedians, that were set when Rambot briefly took Wikipedia by storm in "dark ages" past.
• After a couple months of hovering in the 60s and 70s, Wikipedia's one-day Alexa rating reached number 53 in Alexa's rank of traffic to all web sites, a new record.

June 2005

June 28

• The English Wikipedia has been upgraded to use MediaWiki 1.5beta1. Many thanks to the developers for all of the hard work they did to make the transition as smooth as possible! A detailed list of changes in this version of MediaWiki is available.

June 26

• Yahoo! has ordered 23 servers for the Foundation, according to Jimmy Wales on the mailing list this morning.
• The process of upgrading the Wikipedia site to use MediaWiki 1.5 has begun. This is being done one wiki at a time, and each wiki will be locked whilst it is converted. Amongst other benefits, this process will finally convert the English-language Wikipedia to UTF-8, allowing much better multilingual support.

June 23

• A collaboration between KDE and the Wikimedia Foundation to integrate Wikipedia content and web services into the KDE desktop was made public at Jimbo's keynote speech [9] at the Karlsruhe LinuxTag in Germany.

June 19

• The English Wikipedia now has 600,000 articles! The 600,000th article to be added was (probably) Poona Bayabao, Lanao del Sur, by TheCoffee at 00:20 UTC on June 19th.

June 15

• New statistics charts are available, showing how the new Amsterdam cluster is now taking much of the load off the Paris and Florida clusters. Note that because the Amsterdam cluster serves a limited geographical area, its traffic shows a much greater daily variation than that of the Florida cluster. (Chart: Amsterdam cluster data is in green)

June 8

• The Amsterdam cluster is live, and serving users in Europe. (pictures)
• The new database servers have arrived in the Florida data center

June 7

• The Florida server cluster move has been completed.
• The main Wikimedia server cluster in Florida will be down for relocation to another building beginning at 0700 UTC (3am US EDT, 0900 CEST). The downtime is not expected to last beyond 2100 UTC (5pm EDT, 2300 CEST). This downtime will affect all Wikimedia projects. [10]

June 4

• Eleven new Wikimedia servers are in the process of being deployed in Amsterdam. When this is live, this will be Wikimedia's third data center, in addition to the Florida and Paris clusters.

May 2005

May 24

• The 100,000th file is uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons media repository, which includes a vast number of free content images and other media contributed by members of the international Wikipedia community, including:
  • Reproductions of 10,000 public domain paintings from ancient to modern times
  • 7,733 pronunciation files in various languages
  • Hundreds of public domain recordings of classical music
  • A growing collection of videos of historical speeches
• Wikipedia:Featured list candidates is open for nominations and votes.

May 9

• The English-language Wikipedia hits the meaningless, but pretty-looking milestone of 555,555 articles.

April 2005

April 30

• A new survey has been created to ask, Should biographical entries in the Wikipedia begin with a prefixed style of formal address? Survey may potentially change the status quo for use of style in a large number of existing biographical pages.

April 20

• After a dip this weekend, Wikipedia's daily Alexa rank surged to 56, with a weekly average of 76.

• Wikipédia francophone, the French language edition of Wikipedia, becomes the fourth edition to reach 100,000 articles (Press release, in French). The 100,000th article is on Pierre Saguier.

April 12

• Wikipedia's traffic continues to rise at an unprecedented rate. Alexa's traffic rank for Wikipedia has risen to a weekly average of 77, with a one-day rank of 66. From wondering whether Wikipedia would ever get into the list of top 100 websites, we are now in a situation where breaking into the top 50 is now a realistic prospect.
  • On account of this, Wikipedia's traffic has now outpaced that of Ask Jeeves ([11]) a heavily-advertised commercial search engine. [12]

April 7

• The Wikimedia Foundation and Yahoo! announced today that they have reached an agreement by which Yahoo will provide hosting capacity to Wikimedia. Yahoo will dedicate a significant number of servers in one of its Asian facilities for hosting Wikimedia's free content websites. See the press release and announcement.

• Traffic continues to increase at an unprecedented rate [13], with a weekly average Alexa ranking of 82 and a daily rank of 77.

• Google today introduced a Q&A service which displays facts at the top of certain search results. Many of these results utilize Wikipedia for answers. [14] Examples include "who is Ira Glass?" and "when was Jim Carey born?".

April 3

• Wikistats are now available for all Wikimedia projects. More at meta.

April 2

• Traffic continues to skyrocket, with Wikipedia's daily Alexa ranking peaking at a daily rank of 89 and a weekly average rank of 97. Several key placements on search engines have aided in the encyclopedia's popularity, such as #2 for online poker, #3 for Terri Schiavo, and #9 for Pope John Paul II.

March 2005

March 31

• It appears that the month of March, as well as the year to the end of March, have broken new records for Wikipedia's growth. I will recheck my calculations tomorrow and upload the new statistics on the Wikipedia:Multilingual statistics page, but a preliminary check shows that Wikipedia (in all languages) has gained more than 104,000 new articles in March—the first time we've ever broken into six figures in a single month. (The figure will be slightly higher tomorrow, when I add in today's gains). In the twelve months to the end of March, Wikipedia appears to have gained just over one million new articles—another first.

March 29

• As you may have noticed, Wikipedia is currently having difficulties accepting new edits. If you receive an error, chances are that your edit was saved, but that server problems prevent Wikipedia from showing you the newly-edited page. If you get an error, make sure you have a backup copy of the edit you made, and then try to reload the original article. When getting an error while saving a change the back button will also often take you back to the edit screen containing your modified text.

March 28

• The Wikipedia:N degrees of separation located in the Wikipedia: Department of fun has proven to be quite successful. If you're bored, stresed, or you just want a fun way to find new pages to work on then come on in and give it a try.

March 27

• A new survey has been created to assess consensus regarding naming conventions for colleges and universities where the common name can create ambiguities (e.g. "University of Texas" [at Austin] vs. "University of Texas at Dallas"). Survey addresses both the specific case of the "University of Maryland" and a general proposal for amending Wikipedia:Naming Conventions. Such an amendment potentially impacts a large number of existing pages.

March 23

• For the first time, Wikipedia's daily Alexa traffic rank is a record 95, making Wikipedia a Top 100 Website, even if only briefly. The weekly traffic rank is 109, also a record.

March 22

• Surfwax has just announced its LookAhead search term suggestion technology combined with Wikipedia into a new site called WikiWax.

March 21

• Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship is a proposal to allow Wikipedians to vote on the demotion of administrators, just as they vote to promote them. A straw poll is open to gather consensus as to whether such a process should be available.

March 17

• The English Wikipedia reaches 500,000 articles. The 500,000th article has been identified as Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union. See Wikipedia:Press_releases/March_2005.

March 12

• Wikisource : New vote on language subdomains

March 10

• The image server is currently overloaded; system administrators are working to cut down on load prior to installing more efficient software and more powerful hardware to handle this task. See [15] for details.
• Wikipedia is now #4 in Alexa's list of the top 50 reference sites.
• The Thai wikipedia has reached 1000 articles today. The jubilee article is แฮร์รี่ พอตเตอร์ (Harry Potter).

March 5

• The damage caused to the Wikipedia cluster by last week's power outage appears to have been mostly repaired, and Wikipedia performance appears to be back to being fast and reliable.

March 2

• Wikipedia is chosen as part of the Yahoo! Netrospective, a list of one hundred websites, people and phenomena which Yahoo! put up to commemorate their 10th anniversary as a company. Others on the Netrospective include Amazon.com, Napster, Google, Open Directory Project and Mahir Cagri.

February 2005

February 28

• You did it! Thanks to your generosity we exceeded our fund drive goal by 15%. Update: the goal has now been exceeded by 26%: see details.

February 26

• Wikipedia response times remain bumpy, and availability is sometimes intermittent. The Wikimedia systems admins are working hard behind the scenes to restore the server cluster, server by server, while still leaving the site running. More information will be available as things change.

February 23

• Wikipedia is back in service, although work continues to attempt to undo the remaining damage caused by the crash. A summary of events can be found at m:February 2005 server crash.

February 22

• A major power failure at the colocation centre where Wikipedia's main servers are hosted crashes all the Wikipedia servers. Several database servers were corrupted. Fortunately, one server had intact data, and, after replaying transaction logs, all or almost all data was salvaged from the crash. After many hours of total downtime, Wikipedia was brought up in read-only mode.

February 18

• A major vote on Talk:Gdansk/Vote aims to resolve the multi-year conflict about the naming of Gdansk/Danzig and other locations with a Polish/German history. This vote affects dozens of pages, please vote! Voting ends at 0:00 UTC on Friday, March 4.

February 15

• The German Wikipedia becomes the second edition to reach 200,000 articles. The 200,000th article is de:Das Grüne Buch (The Green Book).

February 11

• The Japanese Wikipedia becomes the third edition to reach 100,000 articles. The 100,000th article is 鉄鉱石 (iron ore). A press release ja:Wikipedia:プレスリリース/10万項目達成 is being prepared.

February 9

• Ten new servers have arrived; 6 planned as squid servers, 4 planned as Apache servers. It will take some time for them before they can put into full service, as they need to be installed, networked, configured and tested first.

February 8

• The Slovenian Wikipedia reaches 10,000 articles.

February 6

• The Chinese Wikipedia reaches 20,000 articles.

January 2005

January 27

• The Dutch Wikipedia reaches 50,000 articles.

January 23

• About a week ago Wikimedia received a grant of $40,000 from the Lounsbery Foundation.

January 22

• The Wikipedia image tagging project finishes adding image copyright tags to the last of more than 100,000 images.

January 20

• Wikipedia's one-day Alexa traffic rank has leapt to a new record of #122 (weekly average rank of #163). New servers are on order to accommodate the increased traffic.

January 15

• Wikipedia celebrates its fourth birthday! Leave Jimbo a a Wikipedia birthday message, if you feel so inclined. The English Wikipedia passes the milestone of 450,000 articles on the same day.

January 14

• Wikipedia is now running Mediawiki 1.4beta4+, according to Tim Starling.

January 10

• First edition of the Wikipedia Signpost, a weekly newspaper format news source is published.

January 9

• The French squid servers, Wikimedia's first servers outside the United States, have begun serving non-English content to some European countries. The servers are hosted just outside Paris by Lost Oasis.

January 8

• Wikipedia's Alexa one-day traffic rank rises to a record #130, with a weekly traffic rank of #143.

January 3

• Slashdot is running a story [16] about Larry Sanger's criticism of wikipedia for its anti-elitism and possibility of a fork due to that. In Sanger's article [17] slashdot cites, he identifies two problems: (1) lack of public perception of credibility, particularly in areas of detail. (2) the dominance of difficult people, trolls, and their enablers. A reaction from Clay Shirky can be found at: [18].

January 1

• Happy New Year!