[Foundation-l] Boing Boing applauds stats.grok.se!

Sat Jan 9 01:05:03 UTC 2010

phoebe ayers wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Bod Notbod <bodnotbod at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 5:57 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> But then, who isn't a contributor since 2004 these days?
>> Is there something special about 2004? That's when I became a volunteer.
>>
>> Is that recognised as the year things reached critical mass?
> 
> No. But there is something special about 2003, when I started :D
> 
> In seriousness, I usually think of mid-late 2003 as our [[Eternal
> September]] date. What do others think?

I'll resist the temptation to declare the day I joined as the "day
Wikipedia really took off". Actually, I think it was already doing
pretty well by then.

Maybe the day Wikipedia really took off was the day of the first
slashdotting: March 5, 2001. That's what our announcements page says
anyway:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Announcements_2001#March_6.2C_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"

"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."

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/02/1422244

"Nupedia seems to be too centralized and slow moving for me. I
understand the need for quality control, but wouldn't it make more
sense to have a more bazaar-type free encyclopedia project?"

"Maybe so! People who want to get started _today_ on contributing free
texts to the world can do so at Wikipedia. All the content is released
under the GNU FDL, and it already has over 1000 articles. Short, and
maybe not the high quality of Nupedia, but with time? Who knows... "

-- Tim Starling