Wikipedia Now Has More Than 6 Million Articles in English

Wikipedia has surpassed a notable milestone this week: The English version of the world's largest online encyclopedia now has more than six million articles. From a report: The feat, which comes roughly 19 years after the website was founded, is a testament of "what humans can do together," said Ryan Merkley, chief of staff at Wikimedia, the nonprofit organization that operates the omnipresent online encyclopedia. The 6 millionth article is about Maria Elise Turner Lauder, a 19th-century Canadian school teacher, travel writer and fiction writer. The article was written by Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, a longtime editor of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is available in dozens of languages, but its English-language version has the most number of articles. The English edition is also the most visited project on the website. According to publicly disclosed figures, the English version of the website averages about 255 million pageviews a day. According to web analytics firm SimilarWeb, Wikipedia overall is the eighth most visited website.

Re:

[groobly]

Also, many have been hijacked by activists. Wikipedia, like everything else, is undergoing rot.

Well, Wikipedia's cornerstones are fallacies.

[BAReFO0t]

It can't be "anyone can edit". Because very very obviously, that doesn't work. But let's ignore that away.

It can't be based on a crowd, as, surprise, surprise, reality is relative, perception is even more relative, the brain is a bias machine by definition, and most of what we know is hearsay anyway. Not even mentioning known and unknown triggers.
But let's just act as if the personal biases, triggers and belieft of those in control are the absolute correct ones and everyone else is a vandal.
Which only works

Re:Well, Wikipedia's cornerstones are fallacies.

[nagora]

The whole concept is flawed from the start. An encyclopedia should be a collection of articles explaining the field which they cover, written by and signed by someone who can be reasonably trusted to know enough to write an overview of whatever depth is desired by the editor. The signing is key - because no one can be completely trusted and the reader should have some chance of finding out the writers' biases.

Meanwhile - whatever the hell Wikipedia is already existed and is called the World Wide Web. Almost everything on WP is plagiarised from some other site or a book. But because Google is shit it's hard to find anywhere else.

I don't agree that an encyclopedia should be only original research - but people who do original research in the field should absolutely be contributing instead of being hounded out because they quoted such.

And good material drifts away under the storm of trivial edits because it's hard to write a good article and very easy to write a bad one. Without real editors and sub-editors, entropy chips away at even the best pages.

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[I75BJC]

On the other hand, it appears that you lack an understanding of "research".
Citations are a definite requirement!
For any research.

For me, Wikipedia offers the same benefit as a pocket, or condensed, dictionary. It's a starting place though not necessarily definitive.

I have to add, that I think it's well-intentioned.

[BAReFO0t]

I forgot to say, that I don't think anyone approached it with a bad intention. Motivated by triggers perhaps. With idealized delusions, perhaps. But not evilness or even stupidity, per se.

It's one of those cases where everybody can do good from the only point of view he can have, and nobody needs to conspire either, yet the result is a trainwreck or even as if they had been conspiring to be evil. Kinda like two people trying to save a rolling wagon from falling into the canyon by turning it around 180 degre

Re:

[LenKagetsu]

Wikipedia made two major mistakes: Not allowing original research, and deciding what is and is not a reliable source. This results in a severe bias on anything controversial.

Re:But only around 1 in 150 are "good" or better

[hcs_$reboot]

1 in 197 actually, but that number seems unfair. Even articles that are not categorized as good articles, most actually, are usually interesting, and even sufficient, for most readers.

Re:

[hcs_$reboot]

Really? Well, when the previous pope, Benedict XVI, had been elected, someone edited his wikipedia page and replaced the new pope picture with the one of a Star Wars character, master Yoda (there is some ressemblance). That was not accurate per say, but everyone had a good laugh!

Re:

[fat man's underwear]

The expression is "per se". It's Latin.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki... [wiktionary.org]

You know that this HAS to be said:

[Opportunist]

[citation needed]

There's your citation:

[BAReFO0t]

"Wikipedia Now Has More Than 6 Million Articles in English"[1]

[1] http://some-serious-site.tld/m... [some-serious-site.tld] (Contains a copy of TFS.)

How a grown person could be so stupid to believe that it being written somewhere else would alter its validity, is mind-boggling.

Either you can make a convincing argument or you can't! It does not matter one bit, if you make it right here or somewhere else!
(OK, actually, putting it somewhere else is like T&C: It is hidden away, and nobody checks it. It can also just vanish or chan

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[Opportunist]

Looks like original research to me, to be honest...

Re:

[SharpFang]

And the rules on what sources are acceptable and which one are not rig the system in a certain way. E.g. "no primary sources" - if you want to say a certain shady character was dealing with a certain journalist, you can't link to a tweet by that journalist, of a photo of that journalist hugging said shady character over martinis, but you can most definitely link the press article by said journalist where he claims "I've never seen or known this man!"

Quality, not quantity

[QuietLagoon]

That should be the measurement.

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[lrichardson]

99.9% of the articles are equal to or better than 99.9% of articles in published encyclopedias. Unfortunately, the fraction of a percent of vandalized and/or politicized articles make the front page. Basic rule - if no-one has a vested interest in pushing an agenda - then the article is likely to be pretty good.

Re:Quality, not quantity

[CastrTroy]

Also, some of them are questionable value. While I don't have a problem with Pokemon, I question the purpose of having so many articles about Pokemon when they could just have their own dedicated website (They do have many of their own sites). I would like it better if Wikipedia stuck to encyclopedia type articles rather than allowing articles on whatever anybody cared to write about.

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[Surak_Prime]

If I recall correctly, one of the criteria that can get an article taken down is a lack of public relevance. I can't just go do an article on my unfamous self, for example - it won't stay. Perhaps a desire for specific knowledge on individual Pokemon is more prevalent than you believe. (My wife and I, as well as our two grown kids and many of their friends, still play Pokemon Go, for example.)

I do also wonder, if those articles are annoying you, how it is that you've come to see enough of them to know that

Re:

[twocows]

Their standards don't appear to be applied evenly from an outsider's perspective. They have rules regarding uncyclopedic content (content that's not sufficiently relevant to be in an encyclopedia), but they have countless articles for random crap of no relevance. They have rules that say Wikipedia's not just supposed to be a directory... but they have tons of pages that are just lists of stuff.

IMO, they should just get rid of both of those rules. I don't think there's any particular problem with having m

I call complete bullshit.

[BAReFO0t]

Go ahead, tell me how to reproduce / peer review that 99% claim there.

Wikipedia only contains more text. More hollow data. As OP said: No quality.
Also, what other encyclopedia do we have to compare it to? Ye olde ex paper-based ones? Sorry, that is a different category. Small team, dense, often one-liners. What this is about, is the method! Use the methods of traditional encyclopedias, with a select team as big as Wikipedia's contributors, and online instead of books, and it will havea much higher quality.

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[nagora]

99.9% of the articles are equal to or better than 99.9% of articles in published encyclopedias.

That's just a flat-out lie.

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[lrichardson]

Read this: Reliability of Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. Read some of the studies. The quality is on par with publications such as Encyclopedia Britannica. The average *amount* of information in a Wikipedia article is larger and more detailed. The number of topics covered is vastly larger. If you are looking at a current politician/pop-star/diet-of-the-week, don't expect a gem. You want to look up a science article? WP is an excellent place to start. And, as Britannica stopped doing dead-tree runs a decade ago, anythin

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[QuietLagoon]

...99.9% of the articles are equal to or better than 99.9% of articles in published encyclopedias. ... If those articles use stats such as the one you just quoted, I would disagree with you. But to my point, the emphasis should be on the quality of the articles, not the number of them. If the articles are as good as you assert (without any evidence), then why isn't Wikipedia trumpeting that fact?

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[wilsong]

99.9% of statistics on Wikipedia were made up by anonymous editors.

5 million of those: Doctor Who episodes

[BAReFO0t]

and animes.

But try to add anything actually relevant, and get a "not notable". Aka "Me and my basement don't care or like it.".

But what is left to add?

[xack]

Since Wikipedia rejects many subjects as not notable enough for inclusion, are there really millions of "notable" subjects not yet covered by Wikipedia, or is it coming up to the limits of what Wikipedia considers "notable" human knowledge? Wikipedia famously deletes articles that are not aligned with white male interests, and even those topics that are they are often sent away to the ad laden Fandom/Wikia instead. Wikipedia would probably have over 10 million articles if they weren't so retentive about not

Low bar

[wilsong]

"What humans can do together" is certainly a lot more than cribbing six million pages from other websites, while having incessant arguments about it.

Featured Article Standard

[sinequonon]

The true quantity for measuring Wikipedia are their Featured Articles, because those are held to a much higher production standard. At present, the English Wikipedia has 5,710 featured articles, or about 0.1% of the total. That being said, independent studies have found Wikipedia articles to be generally reliable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

The scent is not the source.

[ikhider]

Wikipedia is at best, a starting point to find out about something--to perhaps get the gist of a topic of interest, if you are lucky. From there, you can parse the sources to get more information. Ideally, you are hitting the library stacks and periodicals to get more details. Or you can encounter and research the topic directly. Some contend that all information is on-line and there is no need for libraries. I counter that most information is not. Moreover, a lot of knowledge resides behind pay walls or pr