Wikipedia hits 10 million articles
By Dave Parrack
You may not always be able to trust what you read on Wikipedia, but with the news that the number of articles has now gone beyond ten million, there’s certainly not a dearth of pages to read.
Over the last few years Wikipedia has turned from a collection of badly written, falsified snippets of information to a huge resource for all Internet users to expand their knowledge base.
There is still the odd fact which on closer inspection turns out to be untrue, but generally speaking, Wikipedia is a very reliable source for all Web surfers eager to find out information on people, places and objects.
According to TechCrunch, the ten millionth article, a Hungarian biography of 16th century painter Nicholas Hilliard, which you can read in English here, was completed on Friday, and takes the site in to the landmark of eight figures.
Although the majority of you reading this article probably stick to the English language of the online encyclopaedia, those ten million articles have been written across 250 different languages, including German, French, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish.
English is by far the most common language though, accounting for 2.3 million of the articles on the site. German and French are the next most popular, with 729,000 and 640,000 respectively.
Wikipedia helpfully has its own page detailing the article breakdown by language, and I’ll be honest that even scanning it quickly, there are a few languages there that I’d never actually heard of before.
Wikipedia is becoming more and more part of daily life. Last week saw the announcement that more people use it than they do MySpace for gaining information on music artists, and new bands.
We already heard recently that children are increasingly being raised online, and I hypothesised that “Wikipedia is the knowledgeable aunt who has lots of facts and figures at her fingertips. Unfortunately not all of it is true, and you’ll have to filter the crap from the good yourself.”
There is still a problem of unconfirmed facts and figures on some Wikipedia entries, but it’s a situation that has improved vastly in recent times. Personally I think there’s no stopping the site, and within a few years, we’ll see the 20 millionth article on there.
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