Wikipedia:Milestones/2002

December 26, 2002
Wiktionary now has its own url and has moved to wiktionary.org.

December 12, 2002
Wiktionary, a companion project aiming to be a multilingual dictionary and thesaurus linked to Wikipedia's encyclopedia articles, is starting up at http://wiktionary.wikipedia.org/.my wikipedi

December 10, 2002
For article count watchers, note that some longstanding drift problems, exacerbated recently by a buglet in the Rambot, have been fixed. The usefulness of the count algorithm is still open to debate, but the numbers are now correct.

December 9, 2002
Wikipedia now has a Google PageRank of 8/10. This is likely to bring in even more traffic and contributors to the site.

December 2, 2002
The Swedish Wikipedia is now running on the new server with a fully localized user interface. Also, a stub has been set up for Greek; the user interface is not yet localized, but it's set up for Unicode and should work for inputting Greek text.

November 26, 2002
Performance tweaks: Until table locking problems are sorted out, the following slow special pages have been disabled during high-access times on the English-language Wikipedia to keep the rest of the site moving: Orphaned articles, Long articles and Short articles, Popular articles, Most wanted articles, and the Maintenance page. They will still be accessible between 02:00 and 14:00 UTC (9 pm to 9 am EST); sorry for the inconvenience.

Also, the watchlist is undergoing some reconstruction; it is now limited similarly to the recent changes list so users with long watchlists don't have to wait and wait and wait quite so long.

November 25, 2002
New discussion pages have been created to explore the possibility of adding a dictionary project and gazetteer project alongside the Wikipedia project. Please let me know if you think this is a good idea.

November 23, 2002
Polish Wikipedia is now upgraded to the new software, and searching works properly on the various non-Latin1-encoded languages such as Esperanto, Chinese, Russian, and Japanese.

November 22, 2002
User contributions lists should no longer be atrociously slow.

November 21, 2002
We've recently made some tweaks to the database configuration which should be making site response a bit snappier during peak hours. (yay!)

Also, the long-missed "Show new changes from (time)" link in Recentchanges has been reimplemented.

November 16, 2002
Hit counters and site statistics are back online.

November 15, 2002
The Esperanto Wikipedia is one year old today, and has been moved over to the new server and upgraded to the new wiki software.

November 14, 2002
Due to an almost overwhelming number of posts to Wikipedia-L mailing list two new mailing lists have been set-up; WikiEN-L@Wikipedia.org and Announce-L@Wikipedia.org. WikiEN-L will be used to discuss matters that only concern the English Wikipedia. Announce-L will be a place to post general announcements that pertain to the whole project. Wikipedia-L will now be reserved for policy and other discussion that pertains the whole project -- all languages.

A Polish language mailing list has also been set up. You can subscribe at WikiPL-L.

November 11, 2002
Wikipedia has been experiencing a great deal of traffic lately and site performance has suffered greatly because of this. As a temporary fix the developers have disabled page count and site statistics updating for the English Wikipedia until a better solution can be found. Read more from this post to Wikitech-L here.

November 9, 2002
The new Chinese wikipedia has newly started. It is written in both simplified and traditional Chinese.

October 31, 2002
The French wikipedia is now converted to the new software and running on the new server -- http://fr.wikipedia.org/

If you're so inclined, please help setting up interlanguage links back from the French articles to English and other languages.

October 29, 2002
A new subwiki is being set up at http://sep11.wikipedia.org to more permanently house the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack memorial pages.

Software tweaks: in your user preferences you'll find a new option to "Edit pages on double click". Try it, you'll like it.

October 27, 2002
In many parts of the world, daylight saving time has recently ended or commenced or is about to. If you're setting a local time zone in your preferences, you might want to double-check that it's still your correct local time.

October 26, 2002
The so called rambot completed its mass entry of approximately 30,000 articles on U.S. cities. The process which began on October 18, took over a week to finish. It caused lots of discussion and problems with cluttering up the Recent Changes.

October 23, 2002
The Spanish-language Wikipedia this morning has now been moved over to Wikipedia's new server (at *.wikipedia.org) and upgraded to the new custom Wikipedia wiki software.

Anyone interested in setting up and checking interlanguage links, please give a hand!

October 22, 2002
Japanese online news service Yomiuri Shimbun ran a favorable story about Wikipedia. http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20021022wo62.htm (dead link)

October 12, 2002
Early in the morning EST, Wikipedia starts spitting out random pages instead of the pages users ask for. People wonder if Wikipedia was hacked or if it was just some bug than ran uncorrected for many hours. The latter.
 * No, there was no hack. There is a temporary fix in place. Read:

October 11, 2002
In your user preferences, you can now set an option that will mark links to stub articles (a "stub detector"). The default setting is 0, which turns it off; setting it to another value ("x") will cause links to articles with less than "x" characters to be displayed in a different color, or with a "!" following the link, depending on your other preferences.

October 10, 2002
If you look in your special pages list you may notice a new Maintenance page which has some tools to list double redirects, pages that link to themselves, etc. There are also some new search options, for those who want to search in Talk:, User:, and Wikipedia: pages.

Additionally, the Meta-Wikipedia, for discussion and planning about the project and all your rants and raves that don't fit in the encyclopedia, has been upgraded to the new software.

October 8, 2002
The Danish-language Wikipedia this morning joined the English, German, and Dutch wikis in being moved over to Wikipedia's new server (at *.wikipedia.org) and upgraded to the new custom Wikipedia wiki software with a completely localized user interface. The Japanese wiki is additionally on the new software but isn't yet fully localized, and French, Polish, and Esperanto localizations are in testing. The other Non-English Wikipedias remain on our old server (*.wikipedia.com, running UseMod wiki software) for the time being, but will continue to be moved and upgraded as fast as our volunteer development team can do it.

October 5, 2002
The Dutch-language Wikipedia has now been converted to the new phase III Wikipedia software. The new server is at http://nl.wikipedia.org/ ; the old UseMod-based version will continue to be available at http://nl.wikipedia.com/ for a few days to make sure all pages were converted successfully, then will become an alias for the new server.

Anybody who's interested, please help importing the interlanguage links!

October 3, 2002
Wikipedia received its 10,000,000th hit (since the Phase III Software was installed in July) today, according to Special:Statistics. This works out to an average of about 135,000 hits per day (around 1.5 per second, around the clock).

September 30, 2002
At some point today, the Wikipedia reached 50,000 entries, according to the front page counter. Of course, many of these are short stubs, rather than full encyclopedia articles. Based on article size statistics, and comparisions with other encyclopedias, it seems likely that we there are now between 25,000 and 35,000 basic encylopedia articles in the Wikipedia database.

See also: Size comparisons.

September 26, 2002
The Embassy is opening up to help keep the non-English Wikipedias involved in the overall planning and maintenance of the project. Become a Wikipediambassador and make sure your language's community isn't left out!

September 21, 2002
There are now new graphs available for your interest on the pages Traffic as well as Size of Wikipedia, and Awareness statistics.

September 20, 2002
The much-belated import of pre-January 2002 article edit histories from the old software has been done at last! (See caveats.)

September 18, 2002
Thanks to a brilliant idea of Andre Engels you can now find out who the most active Wikipedians are. See Most active Wikipedians, find yourself and boost your ego;-)

September 13, 2002
On the day September 12, 2002, the English-language Wikipedia served 310639 hits, believed to be a record level of traffic for Wikipedia. See Traffic for details.

September 6, 2002
The server's clock is now set to worldwide standard UTC. Please visit your Preferences and make sure your time zone offset is set to something sensible (either 0 to show standard time, or your preferred local time).

September 5, 2002
In the period August 31 - September 5 2002, the estimated article growth rate appears to have been an amazing 209 articles/day.

September 3, 2002
The English-language Wikipedia is now receiving in excess of 200,000 hits/day on many days. See Traffic for details.

August 30, 2002
The article counter has broken the 40,000 article barrier! Time to aim for the next milestone - 50,000 articles.

August 28, 2002
The German Wikipedia has been upgraded to the new Phase III software. Particular improvements are that the wiki now has its own image upload space, and interlanguage links can now be put in to allow easy linking of articles to their counterparts in the other-language wikis. Expect also fun and exciting new bugs; please help find them so we can fix them!

August 15, 2002
Wikipedia has moved! We are now at www.wikipedia.org instead of www.wikipedia.com. The .com URL continues to work and will for the foreseeable future, but .org is now preferred and is used for internal linking. If you use a login name, you may have to give your password again to stay logged in.

August 10, 2002
Over a year ago, a company made a copy of Wikipedia at [http://the-fact-factory.com http://the-fact-factory.com]. The site is loaded with advertisements and stagnant. We are drawing attention to this site now as it has been pointed out that user pages were also copied to the site. You might want to remove or modify your user page at the site.

August 10, 2002
David A. Wheeler has just released html2wikipedia, a tool that translates HTML into Wikipedia's Wiki format. This may help in extracting existing material: translate it into HTML (if it isn't already), use html2wikipedia, and then massage the results. Obviously, please make sure that you don't just do a data dump - you still need to ensure that the copyright is compatible, that the text has a neutral point of view, and so on.

August 4, 2002
The Mycroft Project has a new search plugin available for Mozilla-based browsers, including Netscape 6, for searching the English Wikipedia. Visit http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html and search for "Wikipedia".

July 21, 2002
Wikipedia is already running the new software on the new server (IP: 130.94.122.197).

July 13, 2002
Wikipedia is going to change software and hardware pretty soon, probably within a week. Please test the new system at beta.wikipedia.com and submit bug reports and feature requests. Edits you make on that site won't affect the real Wikipedia database. Discussion of the new system takes place on the mailing lists.

June 2002
There were no announcements in June 2002.

May 17, 2002
Not the quickest reaction time, but at some point in the last week or so, using the most conservative count available (from the Statistics page), Wikipedia passed 33,333 articles. This puts us over one third of the way to the original goal of 100,000 articles!

May 9, 2002
After much work by a number of contributors on the Wikitech-L list, Wikipedia responsiveness is back to reasonable levels. There are continued concerted efforts to hammer out bugs and improve speed.

May 4, 2002
Wikipedia now has a Google PageRank of 7/10.

April 25, 2002
Wikipedia is mentioned in the Dutch weekly magazine Intermediair, in a column on open source and open content by Herbert Blankensteijn. Article not online; website at http://www.intermediair.nl.

April 16, 2002
More Statistics information - we've now passed 32,000 substantial articles. We're closing in on 33,333 (one third of the way toward 100,000).

April 12, 2002
A few of the signs that Wikipedia is starting to gain some general acceptance as a reference work (at least online among the tech-savvy) are that a recent Salon.com article links to Wikipedia's software engineering article, and the website for development of the popular programming language Perl, dev.perl.org, has a link to Wikipedia's BASIC article.

April 8, 2002
We passed the 31,000 substantial article mark according to the Statistics page over the weekend. Somewhere in the beginning of the Wikipedia there was a stated aim of 100,000 articles. Almost a third of the way there!

April 3, 2002
As of April 3, 2002, Wikipedia has reached the 28,000 article mark, according to its front page article counter. (The statistics page count, which has a different count, shows that there are about 30715 articles, not counting any subpages!)

March 28, 2002
According to the Statistics page we've passed 30,000 substantial articles, continuing our rate of 125 articles per day.

March 27, 2002
The Esperanto Wikipedia recently reached 1,000 articles! Also, in the March 2002 edition of Esperanto magazine there is a short article about the wikipedia along with the Esperanto Wikipedia logo!

Stats: Pages (total): 1,784  "Comma" pages: 1,206  Meta-wikipedia pages: -118  Useful articles: 1,088 

You can find the Esperanto Wikipedia at http://eo.wikipedia.com/.

March 21, 2002
A dump of the complete Wikipedia database has been made available at http://www.wikipedia.com/tarballs/. Caution: this is an 80 megabyte download which is only useful for people who run a MySQL relational database.

March 20, 2002
As of March 20, 2002, Wikipedia has reached the 27,000 article mark, according to its front page article counter. (The statistics page count, which has a different count, shows that there are about 29019 articles, not counting any subpages!) Assuming the previous announcement's figure was quoted from the same stats page figure, this shows a rate of growth of around 125 articles per day in the last 8 days.

March 12, 2002
A glance at the Statistics page shows that we've comfortably exceeded 27,000 pages, even assuming that sub-pages aren't valid. An amazing feat!

Also, the complete 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is now available online at http://1911encyclopedia.org/. Care will have to be taken with respect to copyright questions, but it was published in 1911 - whatever that implies. Before copying everything here, remember to look at Britannica Public Domain for the discussion about the use we want to make of this resource.

March 1, 2002
No longer an employee, with limited spare time, and discouraged that a good job can't be done as a part-time volunteer, Larry Sanger has resigned responsibility for leading Wikipedia and as Nupedia editor-in-chief. Please read his letter of resignation to the community.

February 13, 2002
Larry Sanger has made an important announcement about his involvement in Wikipedia and Nupedia. He hopes you'll read this.

February 12, 2002
Numerous bugfixes and optimizations to the new PHP/MySQL-based software have brought Wikipedia back up to speed. Please continue to report bugs.

Well done, guys!

February 7, 2002
Today, February 7th, Spanish Wikipedia met the challenge. We reached our first 1.000 useful articles. Stats: Pages (total):1.502 "Comma" pages:1.131 Meta-wikipedia pages:-113 Useful articles pages:1.018 Edgar

February 4, 2002
The main page recently announced that we broke the 23,000 article mark. This is in spite of the fact that, in the few weeks since we've switched to the new PHP/MySQL-based software, the website has been running annoyingly slowly. This is a problem our team of programmers has been working on; join Wikipedia-L (or see the archives) for details. Hopefully, this problem will be solved soon, but we can't make any guarantees yet. Thanks very much to the volunteers. :-)

January 31, 2002
New Scientist has an article about open source content that mentions Wikipedia: "'People like the idea that knowledge can and should be freely distributed and developed," says Sanger." The article is free.

January 25, 2002
Wikipedia is now using a new PHP/MySQL-based software. Please read about the new features and report bugs. Updated search bookmarklets are available.

January 17, 2002
Larry reports that the Stanford talk seemed to go pretty well and that he was, mercifully, treated gently.

A (press release-inspired) Software Dioxide article seems to propose that coders use Wikipedia to compile a "Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge." Sounds good. Maybe they are referring to SWEBOK.

January 16, 2002
Larry Sanger will be speaking to the Stanford University Computer Systems Laboratory as part of their colloquium series; the talk can be seen here and the text can be read here.

January 15, 2002
Please help distribute Wikipedia's first press release! (Local copy)

January 14, 2002
Tomorrow is Wikipedia Day, and we're doing the press release tomorrow! Be ready!

January 9, 2002
User:Larry Sanger and User:Malcolm Farmer think it's virtually certain that Wikipedia has over 20,000 articles, and Malcolm thinks there's a 95% chance of over 21,000. So we're "officially" announcing 20,000 articles (on the front page). When we've tried to count pages using the ordinary procedure, with the old search engine, the process times out; but the last time Malcolm tried this when it worked, Dec. 22, the count of "comma pages" was 19,800, which indicates that now, 20 days later, we have certainly passed the 20,000 article mark.

January 8, 2002
A draft press release about Wikipedia (see Jan. 3 below) has been posted on Meta-Wikipedia. Please comment and edit. Note, we are looking for an appropriate quotation from one of our resident academics. :-) --LMS

January 7, 2002
Wikipedia t-shirts, anyone? Wikipedia has set up a CafePress account, and once we upload a suitable design or two, anyone will be able to go in and get a Wikipedia t-shirt (for rather more money than we might want to spend, but CafePress does all the work, which is nice). Please see this Meta-Wikipedia page to contribute designs or design ideas!

January 6, 2002
Status of the non-English Wikipedia pages:


 * http://ja.wikipedia.com/ - Japanese - was vandalized and didn't seem to have any content to begin with.
 * http://ca.wikipedia.com/ - Catalan - doing pretty good, nice content flow for a non-english page.
 * http://ar.wikipedia.com/ - Arabic - not much content.
 * http://zh.wikipedia.com/ - Chinese - not much content (I searched for "talk" and found 0 pages).
 * http://dk.wikipedia.com/ - Danish - not any real content.
 * http://nl.wikipedia.com/ - Dutch - doing surprisingly good! This is unusualy since Dutch isn't really a widely spoken language.
 * http://de.wikipedia.com/ - German - doing real good.
 * http://eo.wikipedia.com/ - Esperanto - doing real good.
 * http://fr.wikipedia.com/ - French - doing fairly well, could use some more traffic.
 * http://he.wikipedia.com/ - Hebrew - not any real content.
 * http://hu.wikipedia.com/ - Hungarian - no real activity.
 * http://it.wikipedia.com/ - Italian - Fair to midland. I guess it is on the low side and could use more activity.
 * http://pl.wikipedia.com/ - Polish - low activity.
 * http://pt.wikipedia.com/ - Portuguese - fairly high activity.
 * http://ru.wikipedia.com/ - Russian - low activity for a country like Russia.
 * http://simple.wikipedia.com/ - Simple English - low activity. Perhaps we could start trying to transfer some of the most useful and widely used articles from the regular Wikipedia to here.
 * http://es.wikipedia.com/ - Spanish - I see a nice effort here, but it looks like only a handful of people are doing everything.
 * http://sv.wikipedia.com/ - Swedish - low activity.
 * http://af.wikipedia.com/ - Afrikaans - not much activity. One guy has done everything.
 * http://no.wikipedia.com/ - Norwegian - virtually no activity.
 * http://eu.wikipedia.com/ - Basque - virtually no activity. Once again, a single person has done everything.

January 3, 2002
Larry Sanger has been invited to speak on January 16 to the Stanford University Computer Systems Laboratory as part of their colloquium series. Larry's topic is, probably, going to be what Wikipedia is and why it matters.

Wikipedia will probably do a press release announcing our first anniversary (January 15), breaking the 20,000 article barrier, and Larry's Stanford talk of the 16th (which will be webcast and locally televised). We hope the announcement of these events will create some nice publicity; it would be nice if we had to call out The Wikipedia Militia (which we can also call "The Wikipedia Welcoming Committee").

Wikipedia haiku might be amusing.