[Foundation-l] 10M articles in all Wikipedias...

Fri Mar 28 22:02:42 UTC 2008

Hi all,

Happy to announce that I just sent the following press release out detailing our 
10 millionth article... which was a new article in the Hungarian Wikipedia.  More 
details below.

Thanks!

-- 
Jay Walsh
Head of Communications
WikimediaFoundation.org
+1 (415) 839 6885 x 609

---

Wikipedia breaks the ten million article mark across all languages

Ten million articles in under seven years

San Francisco, California March 24, 2008 – Earlier this week the Wikimedia 
Foundation reached a significant new milestone: on Thursday, March 27, at 00:07 
UTC the official article count for all Wikipedias combined reached 10 million.

The ten millionth article, a short biography of 16th century painter Nicholas 
Hilliard was created in the Hungarian Wikipedia user Pataki Márta.

Wikipedia now boasts articles in over 250 languages, with the highest article 
counts in the top ten Wikipedias: English, German, French, Polish, Japanese, 
Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. We are also experiencing rapid 
growth in many young Wikipedias, including Marathi, Tagalog, and Cantonese.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation remarked on the 
occasion of this milestone, "It's incredible to think that we've grown from one 
Wikipedia in English to over 150 active language Wikipedias. Ten million articles 
is something we could never have imagined happening so fast when we embarked on 
Wikipedia in 2001. This is a testament to the incredible dedication of our 
volunteers from all corners of the planet."

In December 2007, the German magazine Stern announced in an independent study of 
50 articles that the German Wikipedia was more accurate, complete and up-to-date 
than the longstanding print encyclopedia Brockhaus. In March 2007, a study 
conducted by the Hewlett Packard Information Dynamics Laboratory found that the 
best articles on the English Wikipedia are those that have been edited the most 
frequently, by the largest number of people. It concluded that the correlation 
between article quality and the number of edits validates Wikipedia as a 
successful collaborative effort.

Similar studies around the world continue to point to the increasing accuracy and 
quality of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that is written, edited and maintained 
by a global community of thousands of volunteers.

Wikipedia is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, a charitable, non-profit 
organization based in San Francisco, California.

About Wikipedia <http://wikipedia.org>

The goal of the Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in history, is to create free 
encyclopedias in all languages of the world. Anyone with Internet access is free 
to contribute by writing new articles and editing existing articles. Wikipedia is 
consistently ranked one of the top ten most visited websites in the world by 
Alexa, serving billions of page views every month.

Wikipedia started in January 2001, and currently offers over ten million articles 
in over 250 languages. The largest Wikipedia is in English, with more than 2.2 
million articles; followed by the German and French editions, each of which 
contain more than six million articles. Nine other language editions contain 
200,000+ articles, and more than 150 other languages contain 1,000+ articles.

Wikipedia is entirely created and maintained by a community of active volunteers.

About the Wikimedia Foundation
<http://wikimediafoundation.org>

The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to 
encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual 
content, and to providing the full content of its wiki-based projects to the 
public free of charge. It operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited 
reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the world's 10 
most-visited websites.

For a full list of projects, visit http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Our_projects

All projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are collaboratively developed by 
volunteers using the MediaWiki software. Their content may be freely used, freely 
edited, freely copied and freely redistributed subject to the restrictions of that 
license.

More information Wikipedia's 10 Millionth article (via Wikipedia Hungary), 
<http://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Hilliard> An English version of the article 
can be found at, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Hilliard> Wikipedia 
Statistics, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics>

Press inquiries:
jwalsh at wikimedia.org
+1 415-839-6885

Wikipedia Hungary press contact:
Peter Gervai
press at wikipedia.hu

Regional press contacts in other languages can be found at 
<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room#Official_chapters>