Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)Wikipedia.org> writes:
I thought we might have another week but according to
the last wikistats
update
we had 495K articles on the 20th. That means we should distribute the
press
release on Monday.
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia's_first_press_release
A lot of credit for the growth of Wikipedia has to go to the fantastic
quality of the software that you guys have created.
Hypermedia has been around since the late 60s, but because of the
difficulty of creating and maintaining it, its use has always been
restricted in many ways. Even World Wide Web, a form of hypermedia, is
difficult to create and maintain except by "Geeks".
The MediaWiki software is the best solution yet, to the problem of easily
creating and maintaining hypermedia. In addition to the wiki markup and
the ease of editing, creating links, and other formatting, the additional
tools for looking at the work being done, such as the page history, recent
changes, archived revision and comparison pages, solve the whole problem
of creating a Hypermedia knowledge base.
I think this has played a key roll in its rapid growth.
Using MediaWiki, we have set up an internal wiki site here at Aperture
Technologies, Inc. for gathering and disseminating knowledge about
technical development and other issues. In the six weeks since it has been
made available internally, it has already become an indispensable part of
our development department's operation. We expect to expand its use into
other departments of the company fairly soon.
Again, I consider this "killer app" quality software.
Nick Pisarro, Jr.
Aperture Technologies, Inc.