Wikipedia Announcements

November 9, 2001

After some deliberation on Wikipedia-L and [an essay], we have installed a new wiki, http://meta.wikipedia.com/, separate from the main Wikipedia wiki, for purposes of Wikipedia discussion and essay-writing and such. The purpose of our doing this is twofold: to keep meta-discussion separate from article writing (and thus to emphasize the importance of article writing) and to test out (and get used to) the Wikipedia PHP script. So please do visit http://meta.wikipedia.com/ both to get an idea of how the new software might work and, if you wish, to engage in meta-discussion.

Also, if you have essays linked from your personal pages (e.g., Larry Sanger/Columns) or from Wikipedia commentary, could you please move that content to http://meta.wikipedia.com/ ?

November 6, 2001

Wikipedia can now include TeX or LaTeX formulas (as PNGs) in articles. If you would like to have a formula turned into a PNG, go to http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Edward_O'Connor/TeXinbox and add it to the list!

Size of Wikipedia: 16,000 articles announced. Although we have grown faster in the weeks following September 11, press coverage and Slashdotting, we now--without help from significant press coverage--seem to be growing at a steady rate of somewhat better than 2,000 articles per month. At this rate, we will have 25,000 articles by next April and 40,000 articles by next November. (Of course, no one really knows if this rate is sustainable, but it could be--for all we know, it will increase!)

Announcement from Larry Sanger:

I think we've discussed subpages quite a bit--certainly enough to air the issues and give people a chance to state their views and change their minds--and in view of this, I've decided to get rid of them.

Let me explain this decision--I'm done arguing for it, but of course you are owed an explanation, since the issue has been very controversial.

Examining the various pages on which people have discussed them, it seems there is at least a majority of people in favor of getting rid of them or who are amenable to the idea of getting rid of them. I think it's pretty important, although perhaps not absolutely essential in every case, that we at least not contradict majority opinion, when a consensus cannot be arrived at. The majority includes many old hands who have had more experience with the problems associated with subpages than some of their newer advocates, which I also think is important. Finally, and probably as importantly as anything else, my well considered opinion is that the arguments in favor of getting rid of them are much, much stronger than the arguments in favor of keeping them. I predict yer gonna thank me in a year. (Maybe not all of you. :-) ) --Larry Sanger

See also Wikipedia subpages pros and cons, Larry Sanger/Why I am suspicious of subpages, Larry Sanger/Accidental linking and hard-wired category schemes, Larry Sanger/The case against subpages, Wikipedia commentary/Get rid of subpages entirely.

November 5, 2001

Wikipedia front page has now a PageRank (Google Rank) of 7/10.

November 2, 2001

Wikipedia statistics: Jimbo's been looking at various Wikipedia statistics, and one interesting statistic has surfaced: the number of people (unique IPs) that have edited Wikipedia on any given day of October ranged from 96 to 236, with the vast majority of days between 130 and 180. After the recently increased traffic from Google, it seems we can expect an average number of daily editors of about 170. We can expect this number to continue to climb, however, as the virtuous cycle of content-traffic-contributors-more content continues into the indefinite future.

The number of unique visitors (editors or not) ranged from 3,112 to 7,983 in October, with a pre-October 28 average of about 5,000; the post-October 28 average is shaping up to be something like 8,000. The latter is not expected to decline, because it is not due to press coverage, but instead to (we expect) stable and growing factors related to the amount of traffic Google sends us.

While we're at it, pageviews ranged from 21,491 (on a very slow weekend day) to 48,321. They are now very much on the high end of this range.

All of these statistics are, by the way, enormous increases over just, say, three months ago.

October 29, 2001

A lot of news!

Wikipedia traffic: Yesterday, Wikipedia began receiving a substantially increased amount of traffic from [Google.com], which will probably result in a permanent traffic increase of over 20% compared with the few weeks leading up to yesterday. We're not sure yet why this is happening. Google already was far and away the most important source of traffic for Wikipedia. If the increase is permanent, then in terms of new personnel and increased article production and editing, we can expect that this will have a long-term effect similar to that of a major news article or of a Slashdotting.

Nupedia is about to announce the results of a vote on the details of its new editorial system. Once these details are announced and agreed, then, among other things, Nupedia will be turning to the issue of how it can make use of Wikipedia articles. You're encouraged to join [Nupedia-L] if you'd like to see the Nupedia side of these issues; any issues directly affecting Wikipedia will be brought up on Wikipedia's mailing list, Wikipedia-L. Please do join Wikipedia-L if you are interested in Wikipedia policy!

Magnus Manske is on the verge of recommending that Wikipedia switch to his very fine Wikipedia PHP script. This is good news, but it makes some of us, no doubt Magnus included, a little nervous. (This is not to say we don't have great faith in Magnus.) But we need your help with testing. Go to [1] and do some bug-hunting. Does it work as you expected? Does it have all the functionality of the old Wikipedia software (that we want to keep)?

Recently, Wikipedians have been thinking hard about how best to make Wikipedia fully compliant with the GNU Free Documentation License. Jimbo Wales and Larry Sanger have long been of the understanding that, as in the case of Nupedia, Wikipedia would require links back to Wikipedia articles, for the purpose of further building Wikipedia's base of contributors and articles. Once this requirement was, recently, made explicit in the form of a particular HTML table (see [license instructions page]), some Wikipedians had objections; we hope to reach a consensus on Wikipedia-L.

October 25, 2001

Size of Wikipedia: Wikipedia has passed 15,000 articles. There were 17307 "comma" articles, of which 1600 are /Talk subpages. Of the remainder, 399 were wikipedians own pages, and 229 are pages about wikipedia, i.e contained "ikipedia" somewhere in the title. Take out 26 for the Biographical listings indexes, and that still leaves 15053 pages.

The most basic encyclopedia article topics was created.

October 19, 2001

14,000 articles announced.

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