The Norwegian Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles. The 15,000th article was UIAA by Peter J. Acklam or Galen by an anonymous user
The Japanese Wikiquote has reached 100 articles. It took 34 days from the 50th article. The milestone article is 阿倍仲麻呂, a 8th Century Japanese politician and poet.
The Polish Wikipedia has reached 50k articles. Congratulations! 50,000th article was Diablo_2 by an unknown user.
Japanese Wikipedia has reached 90,000 articles. The milestone article is about ja:ガヤトリ・スピヴァク（Gayatri Spivak), an India born critic. Now Japanese Wikipedia has around 200 new articles per day, over 15,000 registered users. Over 100 users are very active but 40%-50% of edits are done by anonymous users. There are 26 administrators and some users are requesting now for adminships after a long discussion and a vote for improvement of adminship request rules in this fall.
All Wiktionaries became unaccessible because its domain name was expired. The problem was solved on December 17 and Wiktionary regained its connectivity.
The Romanian Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles! The 10,000th article is Opera poetică a lui Mihai Eminescu, about the works of the great Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu. The creator of this article was Moby Dick. Ro.wiki reached 10,000 articles exactly one month after reaching 9,000 articles! A big thank you to all the contributors on the Romanian Wikipedia - without you we couldn't have done it!
With the Romanian milestone, 20 Wikipedias now contain over 10,000 articles. Wikistats has up-to-date size comparisons.
A completely rewritten spam filter has been incorporated into MediaWiki, which blocks URLs containing certain domains and words. The new filter comes with a greatly expanded blacklist, derived from the publically available Wikiblacklist. Because of the wide range of entries in the list, there have been a few false positives reported (including the blocking of all links to .com.cn). Any meta sysop can edit the spam blacklist to remove the links that are triggering the filter, with the changes taking effect immediately, so if you are an administrator be prepared for such requests. New links can also be added to the list if a new spammer should start making the rounds.
In Rotterdam the first Wikipedia Symposium was held. It was a great success, with over 40 people present, among which were were Jimbo, Angela and Anthere, the rest coming from the Netherlands and Flanders, except for Waerth who was visiting the Netherlands from Bangkok. Talks were held on the following subjects: Python Wikipedia Bot, Wiktionary and Categorizing.
The South African Collaboration of the Week on the English Wikipedia is launched today. It intends to further develop the quality of Wikipedia articles about South Africa.
The Swedish Wikipedia passes the english Wiktionary. The swedish Wikipedia is now the world's seventh biggest wiki, by page count. (49496 on svwiki, 49425 on enwiktionary, 14:07, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)).
10 Wikipedians gathered in Osaka, Japan. It was the first meetup of Japanese Wikipedians announced in advance, though some wikipedians saw each other in occasion. They enjoyed the meetup and discussed on current issues on Japanese Wikipedia (how to treat vandals and/or trolls, which rules should be improved, what experience they have on Wikipedias, what kinds of articles they have written and expect to write and so on). Another meetup in Tokyo is planned now. Further information on meetups is available.
Vala, a user of the Italian Wikipedia, graduated in sociology with a thesis on Wikipedia. She graduated "summa cum laude". This is the first time in Italy that a thesis on this subject has been discussed.
ウィクショナリー, the Japanese Wiktionary, has passed 1,000 words. The milestone word was アイスランド (Japanese for Iceland) by FoX. The last milestone passing was on September 21. This growth depends on some active anon users.
There has been a huge spike in traffic over the last two days leading to slower than normal load times. Our previous Alexa ranking record was 349 on September 22nd; yesterday we skyrocketed to 290 and climbed again today to 260.
WikiCommons reached the milestone of 1000 uploaded files (mostly images, but also over 100 sound fragments and 1 movie). The 1000th file was an image, uploaded by Robbot (the robot of Andre Engels), showing a mission post in California around 1792.
The Japanese Wikipedia has reached 75,000 articles. The milestone was celebrated with the article 貞応, an era in medieval Japan (1222-1224), posted by Zippin. Of around 12,000 registered users, about 100 are very active. It took 22 days since the 70,000th article in early September.
WikiWoordenboek, the Dutch Wiktionary, has achieved its 5.000 article. The word Italie (French for Italy) was the word that completed this lot. One of the major accomplishments was that we were able to copy content to the Japanese, Vietnamese, French, Catalan, Asturian, Italian and English Wiktionaries. A special thank you is for Timwi, his website with the names of languages was an important source of content that did previously not exist in the Wiktionaries.
After being inaccessible to Mainland China users for several days, Wikipedia seems to be generally accessible again, even though an appeal prepared by Chinese Wikipedians has not yet been sent out. (The block in June ended when an appeal was sent by Chinese Wikipedians to government agencies.)
It cannot be exactly determined which article was the one millionth, but estimates are that it was created on September 14 around 21:55. Because of this, the official millionth article is the first article after this time, being דגל קזחסטן, the Hebrew article about the flag of Kazakhstan.
There are unconfirmed reports that all Wikimedia sites have once again been blocked in China. Some users report that they cannot access Wikimedia sites at all; others say that they still can. Wikipedia has been blocked in China before, from June 4 to June 21; the block ended after several members of the Chinese Wikipedia appealed to various agencies administering the block. (Internet blocks like these are not administered centrally or systematically.) Another appeal has been drafted following this most recent block.
The Romanian Wikipedia reached 8,000 articles, making it the 18th largest Wikipedia. This article growth marks the second in a series of initiatives to revitalise the Romanian Wikipedia (the first was the redesigning of the Main Page.
The Hebrew Wikipedia has reached 10,000 Articles. Yes! Yes! Yes! WE DID IT !!! Happy New Year! Shana Tova!שנה טובה - שנת שלום בעולם כולו Year of peace in our globe. In addition, over the past month, as the Hebrew wikipedia was racing towards the 10,000 article milestone, all of the sister projects were set up in Hebrew domains (Hebrew Wiktionary, WikiBooks, WikiQuote, and WikiSource; active users have begun adding content to all of them.
The German Wikipedia has reached its first 200 articles voted to be excellent - and this with a rather big bang. Some way to go to the goal of 10,000, but still...
The Japanese Wikipedia reached 70,000 articles. The 70,000th articles is チャック・サッカー (Chuck Thacker) edited by an anonymous user. It took 50 days to reach the milestone from the 60,000th article. The growth average has been steady in those recent months. see also ja:Wikipedia:70000記事達成
A new Main Page layout is launched for the Romanian Wikipedia, based on the designs of several other Wikipedias, including English and Bulgarian, and some new ideas too. This is just the first in a series of qualitative improvements that will occur throughout the Romanian and Aromanian Wikipedias this year.
Japanese Wikipedia has been nominated to the 2nd Web Creation Award (Japanese Wikipedia contributers only) organised by Japan Advertising Bureau. In the screening process, Aoineko and Suisui were interviewed by JAB judge members at Shibuya, Tokyo. The consequence of award will be announced on September 9 at its celebration celemony.
The French Wikipedia has reached 50,000 Entries. Congratulations! It's the 4th Wikipedia passing 50k articles. 50,000th article was "Nèfle" by Anthere! Mail of announcement and explanation of the choice of article.
Jimbo's presence in Amsterdam for a conference was celebrated with a Wikimeet in Utrecht, which including Jimbo had 12 participants, making it the largest Dutch Wikimeet to date by far.
The Welsh Wikipedia expanded over 20% overnight to over 2500 articles, when a bot was employed to fill in missing years between 1000 and 1700. It's only four months since we reached article 1000.
The Swedish Wiktionary now has 500 articles. Watch out en:, we're coming!
The Dutch wiktionary has reached its 2.500th word. The content is mainly names for languages. The content is from Timwi's website. He wants to discontinue it and the content is now in a form that it can be easily copied to another wiktionary.
Hurricane Charley is expected to make landfall near Tampa, Florida on August 13. Wikimedia's hosting center is prepared for the storm, but downtime is possible. For offsite updates on Wikipedia's status, see the Wikipedia Status page at OpenFacts.
(July 21/August 1) The Serbian Wikipedia has 1000 articles. We suppose that the milestone article was the page about Saturn in Serbian, but it is also possible that it was the page about Neptune in Serbian. We are sure that the milestone Wikipedian is Avala.
The first ever Chinese Wikipedia get together was in Beijing, China, at the campus of [[Peking University|Peking University]] (aka Beijing University). Picture from the event (bottom of page)
Wikibooks now has separate subdomains for the different languages. The German Wikibooks at http://de.wikibooks.org already exists and is in the transfer process. The French and Japanese Wikibooks are well on their way, too.
The Dutch Wikipedia finished its first article writing contest between the contributors. A three-person jury selected the best article among a number of nominations. In total 7 people took part, and the jury chose IJzeren poort by Fransvannes as the winner, with honourable mention for Karel Appel by Ellywa and Emden by Falcongj. And of course the Dutch Wikipedia won by getting seven very high-quality articles. See report.
A meeting was held in Paris with Jimbo, Angela and about 40 Wikipedians from France, Belgium and Switzerland. See some photos and interview (Jimbo, Anthere, Angela, Yann) The first Wikimedia Board meeting was held at this occasion.
Wikipedia's Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for Digital Communities was officially accepted by Danny in New York City at the first ever PAE award ceremony held there. It is a beautiful golden statue of Nike. Quoth Danny in his acceptance speech, "Wikipedia shows that everyone can be a learner, but also that everyone can be a teacher too... In five years I want more people around the world in more languages and of all ages to become teachers and learners." Pictures and the story at Golden Nica Awards 2004.
Ukrainian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles. The 5000th article was Сікорський Ігор Іванович (Igor Sikorsky, the designer of the first modern helicopter) by Gutsul. I would be interested to know whether Gutsul is a human or a bot. It is the second massive growth spurt by Ukrainian in three weeks that has brought it to the 5000-article milestone. Congratulations to them.
The official announcement was made on Foundation-l regarding the foundation of the German Wikimedia Association, "Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens". For boardmembers and other details, see the post.
The English version of Wikipedia was rendered inaccessible in China, coinciding with a national campaign by the Government to remove content deemed unsuitable by Beijing from public access in China. News of the crackdown has been officially verified by Xinhua, [3]. See news reports in: English; Esperanto.
Jimbo met a group of Wikipedians in person for the first time ever in London today. He spoke for an hour and a half about current Wikimedia issues, the Wikiholicspedians socialised and we had a Wikipedia quiz. Then we went to the pub. Report and pictures by Arno Lagrange
Holopedia, born in July 2003, is undergoing reincarnation as the Minnan Wikipedia. As a standardizing Sinitic language, Minnan is here written in the traditional Peh-oe-ji Latin script, as practiced in Taiwan. Current priorities include bringing onboard the 180 off-site articles, localizing the interface to grow the community, and negotiating an appropriate subdomain name.
All Wiktionaries have been upgraded to MediaWiki 1.3.
JimbometArno Lagrange in person for the first ever international meeting between two wikipedians.
The Hungarian Wikipedia has passed the 1000 article milestone. Looking forward to further growth.
In the mainland China a part of users are unable to visit the Chinese Wikipedia. Other languages' Wikipedia and other projects are still accessible. It is strongly suspected the Chinese government might have blocked the access to the Chinese Wikipedia. Soon after the suspected block, user in China became unable to access the English version of Wikipedia, this block seems to have been lifted on June 17.
The Bulgarian Wikipedia has exploded. As of June 2, its article count stood at 5715 - a gain of almost four thousand on the 1896 articles registered on 22 May. The 5000th article, created on 31 May, was Сухозем, about a city in central Bulgaria. The "author" was Robo5, a Bot operated by Borislav. This bot, very similar to the (dormant) Rambot which Anglowikipedians know so well, has been responsible for the vast majority of the four thousand new articles.
The Norwegian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles. The 5000th article was IPod, about the iPod, the new digital music software packaged with Apple computers, by Profoss.
The Aromanian Wikipedia has been set-up, after a long period of waiting and anticipation. Although Aromanian is a small language, the Aromanian Wikipedia has big hopes for the future, hoping to become an important Wikipedia. The Aromanian Wikipedia has been started up by the folks at the Romanian Wikipedia, since Aromanian is very similar to Romanian.
The Japanese Wikipedia reached 50,000 articles at 17:12pm. The honour for the 50,000th article, 哪吒太子 ("The Crown Prince"), goes to an anonymous user with the IP of 219.5.168.60. It is 54 days since the 40k milestone was passed on April 1.?During this term, about 400 Wikipedians have contributed more than five times by month, new articles by day was 186 in average, average editing times by article was 8.4. 35% articles are over 0.5kb, 6% articles are over 2kb. Both are 1 point in growth from April.
The total Wikipedia project has passed 700,000 articles. Given that today's article count was 702,163, and that Wikipedia has grown at an average rate of 2238 new articles per day over the past week, it is likely that the 700,000 milestone was reached sometime yesterday (May 21). The previous milestone (600,000) was passed on April 3, so the 48-day interval is not quite a record (the 600,000 milestone took only 42 days), but it's close enough. A number of interesting trends are apparent. The English Wikipedia share has dropped to just 38.55 percent of the total; it is still by far the largest, but many of the smaller Wikis are showing incredible vitality. The German, Japanese, and Italian Wikipedias have all doubled in size; the Chinese Wikipedia has done even better, percentagewise. Chinese and Italian have both passed the 10,000 mark; Japanese will hit 50,000 in the next 48 hours, and on present trends German will become only the second Wiki to reach 100,000 by the end of June, at the latest. Among the smaller Wikis, Portuguese and Hebrew have shown strong growth over the past couple of months. As always, the Romanian wiki has shown consistent growth. A particular surprise is Ukrainian: after months of steady but unspectacular growth, it has suddenly put on a phenomenal growth spurt and added almost a thousand articles in a mere seven days; only English, German, and Japanese have done better. Time will tell whether this new surge is just a solar flare, or something lasting, as one certainly hopes. Defying the general growth trend, the Interlingua Wikipedia continues to shrink - but that is for the better. Andre Engels and Fire have gone on a deleting spree to clean up the rubbish dumped by vandals. Shorn of its cancerous growths, it should soon be able to resume its former healthy growth.
Swedish Wikipedia has reached 30,000 articles, becoming the 6th to do so.
System administrators intend to release MediaWiki version 1.3 today. This version of the software incorporates many new features introduced the 1.2 branch. See MediaWiki roadmap for details. Report new bugs and make any comments at comment page.
For the third time in 4 days The Chinese Wikipedia is hit by a large-scale vandalism attack, creating hundreds of pages with the same content. Actions are being considered to make this kind of vandalism harder or its cleanup easier.
Wikipedia has been awarded a Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in its new Digital Communities category. That makes us one of seven sites/groups to receive ~10,000 Euros and be asked to give a public lecture in September in Linz, Austria at the Ars Electronica Cyberarts Festival. As one of the two winners in this new category, we will also be sending a representative to a separate ceremony (cohosted with SAP New York) in Manhattan in June. Please help update the Linz, cyberarts, Ars Electronica, and related articles on your language's Wikipedia!
(I don't know where to post this, so I'll put it here, and anyone can move it to a more appropriate location. Mi ne scias kie meti cxi tiun mesagxon, do mi metas gxin cxi tie. Iu ajn povas movi gxin al pli tauxga loko). Let us all express our sympathy to Arno Lagrange, one of our Stewards, whose father, one of the pillars of the Esperanto movement in France and also internationally, died the day before yesterday. Ni esprimu niajn kondolencojn al Arno Lagrange, unu el niaj Steuxardoj, kies patro, gravegulo en la movado Esperanta, kaj en Francujo kaj internacie, mortis antaux du tagoj. Let us all take a moment to think of Arno and his family at this sad time for them, and to express our sympathy. Ni cxiuj uzu momenton por pensi pri la familio de Arno, kaj por esprimi kondolencojn. --Davidcannon12:07, 2 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia has been nominated for Webby Awards in two categories. Best Practices and Community. You can findthe definitions of these two categories. The listings: [10], [11] Webby Awards are a set of awards presented to the world's "best" websites. The awards have been given out since 1996. Winners will be announced online May 12.
As per the Foundation-L Proposal, a new mailing list, foundation-l, is created for the purpose of discussing issues related to the Wikimedia Foundation, such as the creation of new Wikimedia projects, or fundraising ideas. Please subscribe if you are interested in these issues.
The mailing list wikilegal-l is proposed to be merged into foundation-l.
Wikipedia.org nominated by www.google.com for deletion as a collection of unrelated items put together by non-professionnels and therefore clearly worthless.
On the Dutch Wikipedia an article announces the introduction by Philips and Matsushita of a completely new disk, the Multi Purpose Disk, using Röntgen Radiation to get a storage capacity of 5 Terabyte. The page has been kept after April 1 ended.
Angry that the first site to be shown on Google for the search 'Jew' is an anti-Semitic site, someone has start an action to Googlebomb with the page en:Jew. The page is already up from nowhere to place 4 (now place 1/2 - April 19) for this search. See: [12]
The English Wikipedia has a group of members who have started a Wikipedian voluntary association to help members in the dispute resolution process there. The organization is called the Association of Members' Advocates. They are exercising their democratic rights and are conducting an online election for Coordinator; nominations, open to all (even non-members of the association), close at 07:15, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC).
A new mailing list, Foundation-L, for Wikimedia issues is proposed. The proposal is at Foundation-L Proposal. Please vote by March 31, 20:00 UTC.
From 23:09-23:19 UTC there was a fast interlingual vandalism attack on the Wikipedias, changing the Main Page of over four dozen languages (I didn't count exactly, but the attack targeted more wikipedias than not) to an offensive (and badly written) text. The vandalism was done in a course of minutes, maybe suggesting either someone who knows his way around or a bot-supported attack. Reverting this kind of attack is not easy, as there are no tools to fight interlingual vandalism (well, merging the database, making a common recent changes, being able to ban wikipedia-wide and such things would help greatly, but are definitvely non trivial changes) As I see right now, the attack even hit Meta, the Sep11-Wiki, Wikibooks and WikiQuote... (who'd ever think, the Meta-Wikipedia would become a target for vandalism?) I'm not sure if all Wikipedias are cleansed from the attack, I went through all the (at least somewhat) active ones, I hope. Please help checking if you can on the really small wikipedias.
Wikipedia today had perhaps its worst vandalism attack yet, as a vandalbot using multiple IPs added a link to a Chinese commercial webpage to hundreds of pages on the Frisian, Galician, Guarani, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian and Albanian Wikipedias.
In the last week the multilingual Wikipedia has gained more than 20,000 articles, having now more than 540,000 articles (and this number increases every minute).
The press release for 500,000 articles is a great success in Germany. There is an article in the online magazine Der Spiegel and an item on the Tagesthemen in the national television station ARD.
The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 100 articles. Hopefully they will soon catch up with the Malay wikipedia and we can have a friendly, collaborative race!
Mail outgoing from the web server, including from the "email this user" and "mail new password" features, was delayed for a few days. The mail backlog has now been delivered.
Wikipedia.org's 3-month Alexa rank goes to 868, passing Slashdot.org's 3-month rank (897) for the first time in Wikipedia history. [16] See also: Wikipedia.org is more popular than...
Happy Magnus Manske Day! Two years ago today Wikipedia began switching from the old spartan UseModWiki to a new wiki system custom written by Magnus Manske specifically for the needs of a large online encyclopedia. Over time, bug fixes, and a rewrite or two, this transmogrified into the MediaWiki software that drives Wikipedia today.
All remaining wikipedias that had been on the old wiki software have now been transferred to the new software. Many of them have just a few pages, some have several hundred; all need work -- help make Wikipedia the most thoroughly multilingual encyclopedia in town!
The servers have been shuffled around some more: the database server has received a RAM upgrade and en.wikipedia.org has been moved to a much faster web server, which should help speed things up.
Our regular database server has been set back up (but with less RAM), which should speed things up immensely. Another backup server is being set up, and many new servers are on the way.
Server update: A powerful database server on loan from Bomis is scheduled to be installed today and the shipment of the new server farm is scheduled to arrive in late January.
Wikipedia has been growing for 3 years. Happy birthday! Where's the cake ?
Want to see how Wikipedia looked on March 30, 2001? Visit Web Archive and click around (even RecentChanges works!). (although it is from 2 June rather than 30 March)
English wikipedia has reached 190,000 articles. It took only 27 days of real time since 180,000 articles (compared to 32 days from 170,000) - despite server outages totalling several days.
All wikis and mailing lists should be working, but some features may be disabled because we're on a slower backup database server for now. New database backup dumps are now available at http://download.wikimedia.org
