Wikipedia:Milestones/2004

December 2004

December 31

• Wikipedia's one-day Alexa traffic rank [1] reaches a record rank of #143, the highest one-day rank yet.

December 22

• As stated above, the English Wikipedia is now running on Mediawiki v1.4beta3. See Wikipedia:MediaWiki 1.4 release notes for a rundown of the new features. Discuss technical issues at #mediawiki or post them at BugZilla. --Slowking Man 03:52, Dec 23, 2004 (UTC)
• If you think 1.4's original redirect arrow is ugly, design one for the Redirect arrow contest. Rdsmith4— Dan | Talk 05:21, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

December 15

• I've started Wikipedia:WikiProject Computers if anyone is interested. We're still creating the structure! - Ta bu shi da yu 07:51, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
  • update: Wikipedia:WikiProject Computers has been merged with Wikipedia:WikiProject Computing. -- Paddu 16:11, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

• Stbalbach has started the Middle Ages WikiProject, for anyone interested in/involved with medieval articles. Adam Bishop 03:08, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

December 12

• 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. New links can also be added to the list if a new spammer should start making the rounds.

December 11

• Wikipedia is set to appear in the South African television show go_open. [2]

December 8

• Alexa's traffic ranking stats displayed today [3] give Wikipedia a #190 one-day and a #173 one-week traffic ranking and a one-week average reach of 4,095 per million.

November 2004

November 21

• User:DHunscher and two other Masters' students at the University of Michigan School of Information are studying Wikipedia as part of a course on computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). They are conducting a survey of Wikipedia contributors between now and December 10. The survey is completely anonymous and takes only 3-5 minutes to complete. Your participation would be greatly appreciated. Results will be published later in December.

  Update: 60 responses so far as of 2004-11-23 1600 hours Eastern US Time (GMT-0500). Going for 100. Thanks to everyone who undertook the survey so far, and thanks in advance to you if you are about to follow the survey link!

  Update: 102 responses as of 2004-11-27. The survey is now closed. Many thanks to everyone who undertook the survey. Following the suggestion of one commentator on the survey, when we are done in mid-December, we will publish a summary of the results (and a link to more detailed results) in Goings-on rather than here (though we may post an announcement here that the results are ready at that time). Again, thanks!

November 20

• The English Language wikipedia's 400,000th article was appended sometime in the morning (GMT). The probability is high that it was Eustace Sutherland Campbell Percy, 1st Baron Percy of Newcastle by Timrollpickering.
• Wikipedia's one-week average Alexa traffic ranking [4] reaches #196, a record so far, and the first time the one-week ranking has moved into the top 200 websites. The one-day traffic ranking is even higher, at #158.

November 18

• Alexa's traffic ranking stats displayed today [5] give Wikipedia a #172 one-day traffic ranking, with a 4,000 per million one-day reach. This is the second time that Wikipedia's one-day Alexa ranking has broken into the top 200 sites on the Web.

November 17

• User:Angela appears on the program You and Yours on BBC Radio 4 to discuss Wikipedia; the recording is available online in Real Audio format. The relevant section begins eight minutes from the start of the sound clip.

November 16

• The Forum for Encyclopedic Standards, a new voluntary association, has been formed. The group discusses a system of expert review on Wikipedia.

November 15

• Wikipedia:Trivia Contest, round three is open
• Danny's contest is back for round two

November 14

• The next Arbitration Committee elections will be held from 4–18 December. Candidates should declare themselves before December 3 on the candidate statement subpage. Anyone interested is encouraged to announce their candidacy as early as possible to help determine whether we have enough qualified candidates to fill all of the openings.

November 10

• The Wiki Syntax Project has been launched, with the aim of collaboratively fixing small errors in Wiki mark-up (such as mismatched square brackets, and unclosed bold or italics quotes). A run for identifying outstanding problems has recently been completed for every article in the English Wikipedia, so now we're trying to go through and fix any problems that were found. So, if you've got a few minutes spare, please head on over.

November 8

• The English Wikipedia now has more than 8 million edits over its more than 1 million pages (including redirects, talk, etc).

November 3

• 5 new webservers installed (kluge, khaldun, hypatia, humboldt, averroes)

October 2004

October 22

• Ariel, our master database server, temporarily ran out of disk space, causing our slave database servers to fall out of sync and stop working. Expect poor performance for a day or so, followed by half a day with the whole site in read-only mode while we resync the slaves. See [6] for more detail.

October 20

• The Spanish Translation of the Week has been launched, with the aim of collaboratively translating feature article quality articles from the Spanish Wikipedia into the English Wikipedia. It is hoped that this effort will help spark more collaborative translation efforts.

October 15

• Wikipedia:Chinese wikipedians' notice board (WP:ZHWNB) is now up. More than a meeting place for Chinese wikipedians, the notice board welcomes everyone and anyone interested in China or Chinese culture, and is envisioned as a focal point where Wikipedians can conduct discussions about any China-related topic and be sure that there will be meaningful discussion from people well-versed on the subject. The notice board will also include "requested articles", "articles needing expansion", "ongoing disputes", "ongoing wikiprojects", and other features specific to China-related topics.
• Wikipedia's reaches another traffic ranking milestone. The one-day traffic ranking for Wikipedia reaches a record low (i.e. best) of 197, the first time ranking (albeit momentarily) in the top 200 web sites. (The weekly average ranking figure was 254, also a record).
• Wikipedia receives a very favourable review from the German newspaper Die Zeit in a comparison of the leading digital encyclopedias: [7] (in German)

October 14

• The Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia has begun! We're looking for contributors, so head on over to start!

October 13

• Wikiproject:World music announces that there is an article on the music of every single independent country in the world, as well as numerous dependent territories and subnational entities. They range from the briefest of stubs, such as music of Bhutan, to multi-page series, such as music of the United States. The last one written was on the music of the Vatican City.

October 11

• The Wikipedia servers' hit rate today peaks at a record 1000 hits/second, yet the system remains fast and responsive. [8]

October 9

• Wikipedia ranking is continuing to improve. The weekly traffic ranking for Wikipedia reaches a record low (i.e. best) of 290, the first time ranking in the top 300 web sites.

October 7

• The beta version of Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias has opened.

October 4

• A Seattle meetup of Wikipedians is scheduled for 6 November 2004. We will have people coming from as far as Vancouver, British Columbia and Portland, Oregon. Sign up if you can attend.
• Wikipedia's one-day Alexa traffic rank spikes to a record high of 290. Wikipedia's average over a one-week period was 383, which is the first time it broke into the top 400. See [9] and [10].

October 1

• User:Kenneth Alan has been banned for one year commencing at 00:00 October 2, 2004. See WP:RFAr/Kenneth Alan and WP:RFAr/Admin enforcement requested.

September 2004

September 29

• Jimbo announces that he will be in Urbana-Champaign from 22-24 October 2004, but also in the Chicago area. He is keenly desirous of having a Chicagoland Wikipedia meetup on Sunday, October 24th, in the afternoon, around 4PM and lasting possibly into the night depending on how many people arrive. Please sign up at Chicago Meetup! (And please repost this announcement in any appropriate place where it might receive attention from people in that area.)

September 23

• Wikipedia's one-day Alexa traffic rank spikes to a record high of [11] 349. Wikipedia's 1-week moving average traffic rank has been consistently better than 500 since the start of September.

September 20

• Wikipedia reaches a total of one million articles across all languages. Announced via an international press release.

• The Wikimedia Foundation begins a two week Fundraising drive with the aim of raising $50,000.

August 2004

August 27

• The Main Page featured article becomes available via email.

August 20

• Eight new servers being installed. Some downtime possible.

August 14

• Jwrosenzweig and Raul654 are elected as the new members of the Arbitration Committee (full results)

August 12–13

• Contingency plans are being made for Hurricane Charley, which was expected to make landfall near Tampa, Florida on August 13 but later veered east. Wikimedia's hosting center is prepared for the storm, and downtime is now less likely than earlier predicted. For offsite updates on Wikipedia's status, see the Wikipedia Status page at OpenFacts.

August 5

• The Arbitration Committee election is now open. To vote, go to Special:ArbComVote. Voting will continue through Friday, August 13.

July 2004

July 31

• There was a Wikipedian meetup in Boston. See User:Raul654/Boston for the photos.

July 27

• Elections have been scheduled for two open positions on the Arbitration Committee. Candidates should present their candidate statements before midnight UTC on Monday, August 2, 2004. The election will start on Wednesday, August 4, and run through Friday, August 13. Anyone who has been a registered user for 3 months is eligible to vote.

July 26

• Wikipedia's 1-day Alexa traffic rank has spiked upwards to a record #389, breaking the #400 barrier for the first time, only three days after surpassing the #500 mark.

July 25

• Wikipedia:Dealing with disruptive or antisocial editors/poll opens. The policy proposes compromise position on the divergent views expressed in the recent troll-polls. Poll closes midday (UTC) 8 August 2004.

July 24

• Wikipedia:Trolling poll ended with majority support (42 to 27 (nayes) + 14 (abstentions) = 41) for the troll definition but controversy about how to manage them.

July 23

• Wikipedia's 1-day Alexa traffic rank has steadily risen to a record 471, breaking the #500 barrier for the first time.

July 21

• The Luxembourgish Wikipedia is finally online!
• After weeks of poor performance, Wikipedia's 1-day Alexa traffic rank has steadily risen to a record 503. (The 1-week average figure is 570, which does not set a new record).

July 15

• Another attempt to help out users in the face of the ever rapidly-changing Recent changes and New Pages pages has been set up. Wikipedia:New articles by topic lists Wikipedia namespace pages where new pages on particular (broad) topics can be listed.

July 14

• The Khmer (Cambodian) Wikipedia gets its first article, on the topic of Sin Sisamouth by User:Squash. It has been started using Romanized letters until more native Khmer script writers can contribute. A village pump equivalent has been set up at Wikipedia:Kalein Teak by User:Fuzheado.

July 11

• The site was switched today from using Suda as the main database server to using Ariel. It should be faster now. Suda used six 10,000 RPM SCSI disks and 2GB of RAM for the database. Ariel is using six 15,000 RPM disks and 7GB of RAM.

July 10

• Wikipedia:Trolling poll, a poll to determine our policy with regard to trolls, begins. It will last for two weeks.

July 7

• English Wikipedia reaches 300,000 articles. Rene Gagnon is the reported 300,000th article. Congratulations! The milestone has been announced on Slashdot [12]; Wikipedia is so far holding up under the load, as are the linked articles, Crushing by elephant and GNU/Linux naming controversy. The story includes a request for more MediaWiki developers, linked to m:How to become a MediaWiki hacker.
• English Wikipedia reaches 5,000,000 edits. This is one million edits since May 17, 51 days ago. The previous million edits took 64 days, so the current rate of almost 20,000 edits a day is a record. As well, the number of edits per article is at 12.6 and still increasing, so edits are increasing faster than new articles.

July 3

• Some editors are trying to write to get Wikimedia an NEH grant of up to $500,000. If you want to help see m:NEH Reference materials grant application.

June 2004

June 21, 2004

• Access to the Chinese Wikipedia has now been restored for users in Mainland China. Mailing list post: [13]

June 19, 2004

• Server will be down for maintenance from about 18:00 to 21:00 UTC. The new database server, Ariel, will be put into the production setup. It is planned to have Wikipedia be read-only from a several days old backup during this time. See the mailing list post [14].

June 13, 2004

• Wikimedia Board of Directors elections results: Anthere and Angela were announced as the Contributing Active Member Representative and the Volunteer User Representative, respectively. A report by Danny and Imran is forthcoming, after getting consent from the candidates.
• The German Wikipedia has reached the big milestone of 100,000 articles.

June 12, 2004

• All of Wikipedia has been blocked by the People's Republic of China. The Chinese Wikipedia was already blocked on June 4. Related news coverage is at Wikipedia:Press coverage; see also the mailing list discussions [15].
• The addition of a third Squid cache, maurus, seems to have improved system performance.

June 11, 2004

• Server will be down for maintenance from 18:00 to 18:30 UTC. Reason: "To reboot Zwinger with an updated kernel which will fix the disk driver. This should improve performance; as the main file (not database) server the sluggish disk is a bottleneck." as per [16].

June 8, 2004

• Wikipedia sites were offline for about 36 hours due to a database crash [17] [18]. Very little data has been lost, just time.

June 5, 2004

• 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. More at WikiMeet.

June 4, 2004

• Jimbo met Arno Lagrange ✉ in person for the first ever international meeting between two wikipedians.

May 2004

May 30, 2004

• Voting has begun in the Elections for Wikimedia Board Trustees (FAQ).

May 29, 2004

• The English Wikipedia has been upgraded to MediaWiki v1.3. Please report bugs to m:MediaWiki 1.3 comments and bug reports.
• The English Wikipedia reaches 275,000 articles (What's the 275,000th?).

May 27, 2004

• The 2U server has been delivered and three of the new servers will go online today. This is expected to alleviate the problems with the extra traffic from Yahoo. See this post on Wikitech-l for full details.

May 26, 2004

• Four new servers installed.
• Yahoo! has approved our datafeed, which means that they are going to start sending us "a ton of traffic".

May 21, 2004

• Wikipedia and its sister projects will be upgraded to the next major version of the MediaWiki software, which powers all of Wikimedia's hosted projects, resulting in slight downtime for each upgrade. If all goes according to plan, the upgrade of all projects will take around one day. A test version of this new release (1.3) is currently available at test.wikipedia.org. Software bugs relating to the upgrade can be reported at m:MediaWiki 1.3 comments and bug reports. See meta:MediaWiki roadmap for further info on this and future upgrade cycles and plans.

May 17, 2004

• The English Wikipedia has reached 4 million edits since record keeping began. This is one million edits since March 14 64 days ago (16,000 edits per day, 11 per minute). This is faster than the previous 99 days to get from 2 million to 3 million. Along with this, the number of edits per article is approaching 12, and is currently at 11.9 for each article. Hopefully, this means that the articles are improving.

May 13, 2004

• Wikipedia's daily traffic rank was 426, breaking the top-500 mark for the first time on Alexa.com. Other record stats from Alexa: One week average is 582 and Reach per million is at 2,200.

May 12, 2004

• Wikipedia has been awarded with the Webby Award in the category Community. [19]
• The server was down for maintenance from about 02:00 to 03:00 UTC. See hardware status and this mailing list post for details.
• There has been a poll on Talk:Georgia regarding moving the various Georgias around. Please go and vote.
• In recent days the articles on string theory have been dramatically improved. User:Charles Matthews has learnt that the content has been provided by an internationally-renowned Harvard physicist. The new content is also featured in the science section of the "news for nerds" site slashdot [20].

May 11, 2004

• WikiProject Gastropods is up and running. This huge project is an offshoot from the WikiProject : Tree of Life. Contributions and pictures from new collaborators are most welcome. JoJan 08:33, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

May 5, 2004

• The 100 Worst Britons now all have articles, most of above stub-length.

• Help out by adding images to Wikipedia:list of images, which has recently started; it immediately comes under fire by some editors as being highly redundant, and hopefully a discussion of need for the project emerges from it.

May 4, 2004

• Wikipedia has been awarded with Prix Ars Electronica (Golden Nica) in the category Digital Communities. [21]

May 3 - 4, 2004

• Further hardware upgrades are taking place. See meta:Wikimedia hardware status. Wikipedia traffic is substantially down as several parts of the cluster are running on backup systems or below full capacity.

April 2004

April 25, 2004

• Phase I of WikiProject Elements is complete: Every element in the periodic table has been expanded into complete articles and has had tables of properties placed into them. The project was started on April 27, 2002.

April 23, 2004

• Wikipedia's traffic rank (1 week average) breaks past the 600 barrier for the first time, hitting 596 on Alexa.com.

April 22, 2004

• Alexa.com records record traffic for Wikipedia, with the 1 day/1 week/3 month ranking triple reaching 503/602/697. [22]

April 21, 2004

• A project has started with the aim of writing interesting articles on magic and update the little info on magic we currently have. (see WikiProject Magic for more information)

April 20, 2004

• Wikipedia has been nominated for the shortlist of the Webby Awards in two categories: Best Practices and Community.
  • In each category, Wikipedia is entered both for the Webby award, awarded by the Webby committee, and also for the People's Voice award, awarded by the voting public. (see Wikipedia talk:Webby Awards)

• The English Wikipedia passes 250,000 articles at approximately 00:28 UTC. Charles Hamilton Houston is the 250,000th article. It is 17 days since the 240,000-article milestone was reached. It is just 78 days since we made the 200,000th article. For comparison:
  • The first 50,000 articles took 18 months, up to September 30, 2002
  • The next 50,000 articles took 112 days. This was today's previous record mostly due to automated edits by User:Rambot; after the 100,000th article on January 21, 2003, growth dropped back to about half that level.
  • The third 50,000 articles took 210 days, until the 150,000th article was posted on August 19, 2003.
  • The fourth 50,000 articles took 167 days. The 200,000th article was created on 2 February, 2004.
  • The fifth 50,000 articles have taken only 78 days.

April 19, 2004

• Wikipedia was offline from 0:00 UTC April 19 for about two hours, because of the installation of some new server infrastructure. See this wikitech-l mail for more information

April 16, 2004

• The Election for the Association of Members' Advocates Co-ordinator has commenced. The AMA is an independent voluntary body, focused on dispute resolution.

April 15, 2004

• There is now an article for every German district. Three-hundred-and-seventeen (317) articles based on a common template present local history and geography for these administrative units. It took fourteen months to make these articles complete.

The following announcements were made in April 2004. See Wikipedia:Announcements for more recent announcements and links to other months.

April 9, 2004

• The arbitration policy ratification vote finished, resulting in the ratification of the new Wikipedia:Arbitration policy.

April 4, 2004

• The total multilingual Wikipedia project has passed 600,000 articles, a mere 20 days since the 550,000-article milestone was reached. This increase of 50,000 articles in just 20 days is a new record; the 550,000-article milestone was itself a record of 22 days. If present trends continue, Wikipedia will hit one million articles in September.

April 3, 2004

• The English Wikipedia has passed 240,000 articles. It is only 14 days since the 230,000-article milestone was reached, an all-time record. The previous two milestones were records also.

April 1, 2004

• A popular joke article, the "Main" page (which was getting more traffic than any of the featured pages on Wikipedia), is finally put up for VfD; overwhelming support to delete causes it to be removed in 24 hrs. (April fool!)
• Wikipedia's Alexa ranking continues its rise, with the 1 day/1 week/3 month ranking triple reaching 534/609/748, each statistic a new record. [23]
• In March, all the Wikipedias combined had 884,000 edits, and English had 361,000 edits. That is more than the number of edits in all the language Wikipedias combined in their first two years of existence and is nearly double February's count of 556,000 edits.

March 2004

March 31, 2004

• The Polish Wikipedia has passed 27,000 articles.
• The Swedish Wikipedia has passed 25,000 articles. Five Wikipedias have done so before.

March 29, 2004

• The Portuguese Wikipedia has passed 4,000 articles, only 20 days since its 3,000 article milestone.

March 28, 2004

• The Afrikaans Wikipedia has passed 3,000 articles.

March 27, 2004

• The German Wikipedia has passed 70,000 articles.

March 26, 2004

• New software released. Generate graphical time charts from a simple script. Examples and details at [24]. Please comment on meta.
• The Vietnamese Wikipedia now has 100 articles.

March 25, 2004

• Wikipedia's one-day Alexa traffic rank reaches 541, with a one-day reach of 1,750 per million. Both of these are new record levels. If the present rate of increase is sustained, Wikipedia will be well within the top 500 of global websites within two months. [25]

March 24, 2004

• The Russian Wikipedia has passed 2,000 articles.

March 22, 2004

• The Swedish Wikipedia has passed 24,000 articles.
• The Danish Wikipedia has passed 17,000 articles.
• The Latin Wikipedia has passed 2,000 articles.
• Alexa Internet flags wikipedia.org as a reference site, says Wikipedia should show up on their Top 50 Reference Sites list "within days".
  • Wikipedia is expected to feature at about 18th in the list.

March 21, 2004

• The Wikipedia:Association of Members' Advocates is searching for a Coordinator. See: Wikipedia:AMA Coordinator Election.
• The Sanskrit Wikipedia has passed 1 article.

March 20, 2004

• The English Wikipedia has passed 230,000 articles. This is 15 days since reaching the 220,000 milestone on March 5, which was also 15 days after the 210,000 milestone was reached on February 19. If present growth rate of 20,000 articles a month is maintained, the English Wikipedia will reach 300,000 articles on July 2.
• The English Wikipedia also passes 3.1 million edits since the software was upgraded (July 20, 2002).

March 18, 2004

• The Norwegian Wikipedia has passed 3,000 articles.
• Around 23:00 UTC there was a fast interlingual vandalism attack on the Wikipedias, changing the Main Page of over two dozen languages (I didn't count when I went reverting) 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.

March 17, 2004

• We are seeking volunteers to administer elections to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees.
• The Polish Wikipedia has passed 26,000 articles.
• The Dutch Wikipedia has passed 23,000 articles.

March 16, 2004

• The German Wikipedia has passed 65,000 articles.
• The Bahasa Indonesia Wikipedia has reached its first 1000 articles. Congratulations to Bahasa Indonesia; it is the 32nd language to reach this milestone.
• The Spanish Wikipedia has reached the 20,000 articles milestone.

March 15, 2004

• Voting has started at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumbnailed_images
• Wikipedia now has more than 550,000 articles in 70 languages. It is only 22 days since the 500,000 milestone was reached on 22 February, 2004. Of these 57,710 new articles, 14,642 (25.4%) are in the English Wikipedia and 11,601 (20.1%) in the German. The other three big languages (Japanese, French, and Polish) have increased by a total of 8439 articles (14.6%). Much greater growth has occurred among Wikipedia's "minority languages" which currently have only 31 percent of the articles; they account for 40 percent of the increase - a welcome sign of diversification. If present growth rates are maintained, Wikipedia will reach one million articles on September 29, 2004.

March 14, 2004

• The English Wikipedia has passed 3,000,000 page edits since the software was upgraded (July 20, 2002). That comes to 6.27 average edits per page. This is 500,000 edits since February 8, 2004, 35 days ago, for an average editing rate of 100,000 edits per week, or assuming one edit takes about 5 minutes on average, the equivalent of 200 full time editors (50 at work at any given time). The new servers certainly seem to be helping.
• The Galician Wikipedia and the Korean Wikipedia have both reached their first 1000 articles! Congratulations to both languages. They are the 30th and 31st languages, respectively, to have passed the 1000-article milestone. There is one language with more than 100,000 articles (English), four with between 25,000 and 100,000 (German, Japanese, French, and Polish), five with between 10,000 and 25,000 (Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, Danish, and Esperanto), and a further 21 are now between 1000 and 10,000.
• The French Wikipedia has passed 30,000 articles.
• The Italian Wikipedia has passed 8,000 articles.

March 12, 2004

• The Japanese Wikipedia has passed 35,000 articles.
• The Swedish Wikipedia has passed 23,000 articles.
• The international statistics have undergone a major upgrade. Many line charts have been added with a much higher resolution (weekly figures, some daily) than the existing tables and bar charts (monthly figures).
• The Arbitration Committee has filled out its arbitration policy, and is looking for feedback, suggestions and so on to be voiced at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration policy comments so the policy can be tweaked to reflect concerns.

March 10, 2004

• The Chinese Wikipedia has passed 7,000 articles, only 15 days after it reached the 5,000 article milestone. (Many pages were the numerical years)

March 9, 2004

Today is a day of milestones:

• The German Wikipedia has passed 60,000 articles.
• The Hebrew Wikipedia has passed 5000 articles.
• The Slovenian Wikipedia has passed 4000 articles.
• The Estonian Wikipedia and the Portuguese Wikipedia have both passed 3000 articles.
• Also, the English Wikipedia has passed 50,000 registered users.

• It looks like the new hardware and software configuration has removed the limits to traffic growth. For the first time, Wikipedia's 3 month Alexa rating is slightly below 800 at 799. Daily Alexa rank for Wikipedia.org was 568 (former best ever score was 593) and reach per million users hits 1600/million[26]. Moreover, this growth in traffic seems stable for recent several weeks.

March 5, 2004

• The English Wikipedia has now reached 220,000 articles. It took 15 days since the milestone of 210,000 articles was reached on 19th February. This is the English Wikipedia's fastest ever period of organic growth - only in October 2002, when 38,000 articles were added in a month thanks to robot-assisted submissions, has the wiki grown more quickly. Daily Alexa rank for Wikipedia.org was 595 (best ever score was 593); 3 month average 800. See meta:Wikipedia.org is more popular than...

March 4, 2004

• The Polish Wikipedia has passed 25,000 articles. It is the fifth Wikipedia to pass this milestone, the others being English, German, Japanese, and French.

March 1, 2004

• User:TakuyaMurata creates Wikipedia:Committee of Wikipedians and solicits feedback from Wikipedians to improve policy making process on Wikipedia.

February 2004

February 29, 2004

• The Italian Wikipedia has reached 7,500 articles.

February 26, 2004

• Following the distribution of the press release, today's Alexa traffic rank for Wikipedia is 593, breaking the 600 barrier for the first time.

February 25, 2004

• It's time to submit the new February 2004 press release to the media. The press release page is now frozen; please do not edit it, even if you have sysop privileges. See Wikipedia:Press_releases/Logbook for progress so far.

February 24, 2004

• Our February 2004 press release is in final draft form - only admins can edit it (see talk page to propose last minute changes). It will be going into a hard freeze and will be listed on the Main Page as soon as the 25th arrives in UTC (Great Britain).
• The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.

February 23, 2004

• The new Main Page has gone live.

February 22, 2004

• According to the multilingual statistics we have now more than 500,000 articles! See the Wikipedia:Press releases/February 2004 (scheduled release date: Wednesday February 25th). Please DO NOT submit stories about this Wikipedia milestone at other sites before the press release is actually released (Reason).
• A new Main Page/Test for the English Wikipedia is being put together.

February 20, 2004

• The Norwegian Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
• The Croatian Wikipedia has reached 3,000 articles.
• The Spanish Wikipedia has reached 18,000 articles.
• The Esperanto Wikipedia has reached 11,000 articles:

February 19, 2004

• The English Wikipedia has now reached 210,000 articles. It took 17 days since the milestone of 200,000 articles was reached on 2nd February. This is the English Wikipedia's fastest ever period of organic growth - only in October 2002, when 38,000 articles were added in a month thanks to robot-assisted submissions, has the wiki grown more quickly.
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Hats and Headgear has been launched. Throw your cap over the windmill (go wild!) and join in.
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Highways was launched on Jan. 27. Unfortunately, Spikey was very silly and neglected to put it on the Announcements page. Or the WikiProjects page. Heh. But it's here (and there) now, so get you motor runnin', and join in on the highway...project. The Hats and Headgear one was better, wasn't it?

February 18, 2004

• New WikiProject WikiProject Primates has been started. Grab your monkey suits and let's go ape!
• A mailing list [27] has been set up for wiktionary. See [28] for the rationale.

February 16, 2004

• Bureaucrats can make other sysops, using Special:Makesysop, in accordance with consensus on Wikipedia:Requests for adminship
• After a long outage due to constant server swaps international stats have reappeared.

February 13, 2004

• The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
• Wikipedia is now running on the new servers. The DNS records have now been updated to point to the new servers; if you are having problems, please consider re-loading the page, or re-starting your browser program. There may be short periods of downtime or odd behavior whilst the new system is being tuned: please be patient!

February 12, 2004

• WikiProject Cetaceans has reached a major milestone. We now have an article about every species of whale, dolphin and porpoise. This has meant the writing of about 60 substantial new articles since the project started in September 2003. However there are still plenty of plans for improvements (see the project page for details), and articles are sure to need copyediting so feel free to join in.
• The new Wikipedia servers are being brought online.
• The Croatian Wikipedia has reached its 2,000th article - about the Serbian language. Let's hope this becomes a sign of tolerance and cooperation!

February 9, 2004

• The Japanese Wikipedia has reached 30,000 articles
• The Hebrew Wikipedia has reached 4000 articles

February 8, 2004

• Yippeee!! The Croatian Wikipedia has reached its first 1,000 articles! Yep, watch out, English Wikipedia, we're coming!
• German Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles, just seconds prior to the server freeze.
• The arbitration committee has started its opening session of deliberations based on the arbitration policy ratification vote.
• The English Wikipedia reached 2,500,000 edits since the software was upgraded in July 2002. This has been done in the 2 months since 2,000,000 edits were reached in December 6, 2003. That is roughly 60,000 edits in a week, or assuming 12 edits in an hour per person, 5,000 person hours per week. This is the equivalent of 125 full time editors.

February 7, 2004

• The Wikipedia database was locked for read-only access from 8 February 05:00 UTC = 9pm PST, 11pm CST, midnight EST, 5am GMT, 6am CET. This should have only lasted for a couple of hours, and was necessary to allow a major system upgrade.
• Malay Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
• Romanian Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles.
• Dutch Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles. This is almost precisely half a year after reaching 10,000.
• Polish Wikipedia has reached 23,000 articles.

February 3, 2004

• Wikimedia PayPal donation summary and detail for January available at meta:Wikimedia PayPal donations for 2004.

February 2, 2004

• English Wikipedia reached 200,000 articles at 00:42 UTC. It's one small edit for a wiki, one great leap for humankind. It took 29 days of real time since 190,000 articles (compared to 27 days from 180,000) and about 9-10 months of real time since 100,000 articles - despite lots of weird server stuff. For perspective, it took nine months for the English Wikipedia to reach its first 10,000 articles and about 27 months to reach its first 100,000 articles. See Wikipedia:Celebrating 200,000.

• Wikipedia.org's 3-month Alexa rank goes to 868, bettering Slashdot.org's 3-month rank (897) for the first time in Wikipedia history. [29] See also: meta:Wikipedia.org is more popular than...

• The multilingual statistics of the Wikipedia have been enhanced and newly structured. Watch those Wikipedias grow and take a look at the charts! (This is indeed intended as further motivation for the growth of the non-English speaking Wikipedias)

January 2004

January 30, 2004

• Nine new Wikimedia servers, purchased using about $20K of the money generously donated in our December/January fundraising drive, have arrived. They will be tested and installed in the next few days. This should help reduce performance problems and outages. [30]
• Update February 2: The servers have been installed and have had the memtester memory test run for about 20 hours. That was followed by the VA-CTS tests. On Monday memtest86 will be started for a 24 hour test. Lots of testing to try to make sure that the hardware doesn't cause us any problems later.

January 29, 2004

• A few new features are now live:
  • Fractional time zones can be set in user preferences to adjust locally displayed time
  • Page moves look nicer in Recent changes
  • User, contribs and rollback links displayed at the top of diffs
  • Hide logged in users from RC using Special:Recentchanges/hideliu
  • Non-ASCII MediaWiki message names
  • MediaWiki:Loginend message displayed at the bottom of Special:Userlogin
  • Link table fixed for [[mediawiki:{{{1}}}|message with id '{{{1}}}']] ([[mediawiki talk:{{{1}}}|talk]]) command
  • Edit toolbar can be enabled in prefs (works perfectly in IE, near perfect in Mozilla, not so great in most others); will be refined and possibly made default in the future
  • Extended image syntax, allowing automatic generation of small versions of images, and alignment of images without HTML
  • Images are displayed on the Image: namespace page of the picture.

These features are part of the unstable branch of the MediaWiki, originally developed for Wikipedia, but now used by a large number of other wikis.

January 28, 2004

• Danish Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles.

January 26, 2004

• French language Wikipedia has reached 25,000 articles.

January 25, 2004

• 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!

January 24, 2004

• 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.

January 23, 2004

• The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles.
• The database is now running from a new computer, Gunther, instead of Geoffrin (the machine with the unreliable memory). This may fix the occasional unable to connect to the database errors which have been experienced over the last 48 hours.
• Alexa rank was 618 on the 22nd. 722 today, either normal variation (Slashdot shows a similar cycle) or a side-effect of the unreliability yesterday.

January 21, 2004

• The Swedish Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles. It's the 6th largest wikipedia.
• The English Wikipedia has more than 400,000 total pages in its database, of which about 195,000 are articles.
• Wikipedia's Alexa daily traffic rank is 683 today after 900s yesterday. Too soon to tell whether this is normal variation during the week, normal Wikipedia growth or demand we weren't able to meet because of slow speed.

January 20, 2004

• Our regular database server has been set back up (but with less RAM), which has sped things up immensely. Another backup server is being set up, and many new servers are on the way.

January 17, 2004

• Watchlists are now cached and regenerated up to once an hour, so they should be available all day. Subject to change if necessary.
• The links tables have been altered in a way which hopefully will improve performance and reduce the incidence of strange broken-link errors in the future.

January 16, 2004

• Some features which have been disabled for performance reasons will be enabled at off peak times, adjusted as necessary to handle the load. At present the times are:
  • Watchlists and sysop SQL queries from 04:00-13:00 UTC.
  • Query pages (like newpages) from 05:00-12:00 UTC.
• The Wikipedia is slow even with some of the December new hardware working because traffic and Alexa rank [31] have risen from about 1,000 before the holidays to about 800 now.

January 15, 2004

• Wikipedia has been growing for 3 years. Happy birthday! Where's the cake ?
• Want to see how Wikipedia looked on March 30, 2001? Go here and click around (even RecentChanges works!).

January 14, 2004

• Watchlists disabled for performance reasons. Eight new web servers and a new database server have been ordered and should be installed within the next 14 days.
• Catalan Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
• Polish Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles.

January 12, 2004

• Wikipedia:Conflict resolution has been set-up as a central place to organize conflict resolution in Wikipedia. Please help build that page along with mediation and arbitration procedures.

January 7, 2004

• Japanese Wikipedia has reached 25,000 articles. It's the 3rd largest wikipedia.
• The Spanish Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles.

January 4, 2004

• 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. For perspective, it took nine months for the English Wikipedia to reach its first 10,000 articles.

January 3, 2004

• You may have noticed a "Disclaimers" link at the bottom of article pages. It will therefore no longer be necessary to have manually added links to disclaimer pages.
• Polish Wikipedia has reached 19,000 articles.

January 2, 2004

• Swedish Wikipedia reaches 19000 articles.

January 1, 2004

• 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/