Clocking in at 52 million words today, Hebrew Wikipedia announced they’ve reached 100,000 articles.  At 16:54 UTC, user: Brookli submitted an article about Seaton Delaval Hall, a 16th century English country home. The largest encyclopedia written in the Hebrew language got its start six and half years ago, July 9, 2003, with an article on Mathematics by user: Rotem Dan.

Hebrew Wikipedia is among the top 30 language Wikipedias of 270 languages worldwide.  To commemorate the event, on Friday, January 15th, the community will hold a meeting in Israel at Tel Aviv University where 100 Wikipedia contributors will discuss the state of Wikipedia today and in the future. This event will be streamed live beginning at 07:30 UTC on Friday:  http://www.livestream.com/wikipediaisrael.

Congratulations to all of those who helped Hebrew Wikipedia reach such an important milestone.

Mazal Tov!

Moka Pantages, Communications

We’re excited to report that this weekend, the German language edition of Wikipedia reached an exciting milestone: one million articles! The article was created by user: JFKCom at 11:33am UTC, December 27, 2009, covering the living biography of American horticulturist and author, Ernie Wasson. The new article has already been edited over 200 times by scores of contributors within the first few days of its existence. JFKCom, first name Jürgen, lives in Coburg, a town in Bavaria, and has a deep interest in botany which inspired him to create the article.

German language Wikipedia, the second largest Wikipedia in the world, debuted eight years ago with the inaugural entry created on May 12, 2001. Since then, German speaking contributors hit 500,000 entries in 2006 and 750,000 in 2008. With more than 1.4 billion page views a month, German language Wikipedia is also the second most viewed language edition. Wikipedians created a virtual quilt to celebrate the event.

Congratulations to all volunteers; your work and dedication has resulted in one of the most revered collections of knowledge on the Web. We thank you for your contributions!

Moka Pantages, Communications
Wikimedia Foundation

Hot on the heels of the recent milestone of 3,000,000 articles on English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons has just lodged its own major milestone: passing the 5,000,000 binary mark.  Wikimedia Commons is the vast image, video, sound, illustration (and more) repository of works that can be freely reused by anyone, and perhaps most notably to users is the space where all of Wikipedia’s images are stored.  Few would dispute that Wikimedia Commons is the largest single collection of freely reusable images on the internet.

And the 5,000,000th file?  Although it’s tough to pinpoint, contributors on Commons seem to have agreed that a digital scan (at right) of the 1838 Danish news paper Kjøbenhavnsposten, is the winner, uploaded by User:Saddhiyama.

Wikimedia UK, the international chapter based in the United Kingdom, marked the occasion with an announcement and other chapters and volunteers around the world are celebrating this major milestone.  News also came from the Dutch chapter.

Commons is made possible by the work of tens of thousands of contributors from around the world, in over 250 languages.  Contributors upload free or public domain images, enhance and improve older scanned files, provide detailed illustrations, and increasingly upload free video and sound files.

The Foundation is looking forward to expanding usability of the Commons projects, thanks in large part to a recent grant from the Ford Foundation.

Congratulations to the Commoners on the Commons!

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Beate Eriksen, a Norwegian film-maker and actress, can add another unique claim to her personal history.  Today her newly-minted English Wikipedia article was counted as the three-millionth article created on Wikipedia.  The article was created by user:Lampman at 04:04 UTC, August 17, 2009.  Barnstars (a form of digital recognition bestowed by Wikipedians to Wikipedians) have been flowing in for Lampman since the achievement was announced.

Since its creation the article has already been edited 48 times to include several info boxes, references, and categorization.

English Wikipedia still holds the title for most articles over any other language edition of Wikipedia, but others are seeing impressive growth.  German Wikipedia will shortly push through its first 1,000,000 articles and French won’t be far behind. Currently at just over 13.7 million articles in all languages, we expect to reach 14,000,000 before the end of 2009. Our stats guru Erik Zachte maintains dozens of stats queries in one place that illustrate the growth of projects, trends in editing and participation, and analyses of our traffic.

Congrats to the thousands of Wikipedians who have contributed their time, edit by edit (roughly 326,832,295 since day one), over the past eight years to help English Wikipedia reach this incredible milestone.  Your work has made the web more amazing for hundreds of millions of users around the world. Thank you!

Jay Walsh, Communications

Today we announced some fantastic news. The proposal to see Wikimedia’s content adopt a new dual license system has been voted on and approved by the Wikimedia community.  With the full approval of our Board of Trustees, this now means that the Wikimedia Foundation will proceed with the implementation of a CC-BY-SA/GFDL dual license system on all of our project’s content. The new dual license will begin to come into effect in June.

A Q&A about the announcement has been posted on the Foundation wiki.  You can also find considerably more information, discussion, and details about the license change and the work of the license update committee on their meta page.

A huge thanks to the committee, to the folks at Creative Commons (who have also blogged on the topic), to Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, and to thousands of Wikimedia volunteers from around the world who both authored the content and voted to help make the proposal a reality.

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Wikimedia Commons’ four-millionth image ‘View of Masca at sunset,’ public domain from the Wikimedia Commons)

Last week the folks at Wikimedia Commons were very pleased to announce the milestone of four million images on Wikimedia Commons, the Wikimedia site that hosts the vast majority of image, sound, and video data for the Wikimedia projects.

The four millionth file is a public domain image of the “view near Masca in sunset,” uploaded by user:Kallerna. Masca is a small mountain village in the Canary Islands.

The Wikimedia Commons was launched in September 2004 to act as a central repository for the thousands of images that were being uploaded to a very-quickly growing Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Commons is most certainly now one of the largest repositories of freely licensed media files on the web.

A huge congratulations to the dedicated volunteers at the Commons, and to the tens of thousands of contributors.

Check out the hundreds of other amazing featured images on the Commons.

Jay Walsh, Communications

Eight years ago today Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia.  It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. Wikipedia has become one of the senior sites on the web, growing from a top 1000 site shortly after its creation to the fourth most visited site on the web in the last few months.

And on its eighth birthday Wikipedia exists in 265 languages and well over 10million articles – with thousands and thousands of active editors.

This morning Jimmy conducted an interview on CBC Radio’s “Q” – a national morning show broadcast across Canada and on Sirius satellite radio.  The interview will be ported to podcast a bit later today.  Take a listen to hear the founder recount the history of one of the greatest projects on the web.

Congratulations to all the volunteers who have built Wikipedia from a grand idea to a truly grand project.  Here’s to many more years!

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Today marked the single most active fundraising day since the beginning of our campaign, and maybe in the history of fundraising at Wikimedia. People have come out in great numbers, and with a great total: Over $283K USD was raised in one day, from 8,186 donations!  That’s up from 800 contributions yesterday – or an 892% increase in the number of donations  (see the green spike):

Why the jump? It can very likely be attributed to the intro of our banner inviting users to read a donation appeal letter from founder Jimmy Wales:

This is a tremendous gesture from all the supporters of Wikipedia from around the world. A huge thanks to all of you – here’s to a few more days like today so we can keep pushing for our $6million goal!

Jay Walsh, Communications<

Haisan Station, the three millionth image, uploaded by Wikimedian Mailer Diablo, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

 

It’s always a pleasure watching when projects of the Wikimedia Foundation reach milestones.  Three of Wikimedia’s projects have now achieved new and wonderful numbers.

The Hungarian Wikipedia, celebrated 5 years on 8 July 2008 with its 100,000 article, Erdődi Simon, an entry about a Catholic Bishop in the medieval times.  This makes the Hungarian project the 21st Wikipedia with over 100,000 articles.

The Japanese Wikipedia has also achieved a remarkable milestone by being host to 500,000 articles, on June 25, 2008, with one of the following articles: フランク・ラザフォード (Frank Rutherford)、‎国際チャレンジデー (International Challenge Day)、‎ウエストバージニアの水運 (West Virginia Waterways)、南阿蘇鉄道MT-2000形気動車 (Motorized Rail MT-2000), articles which were created at the same moment the project achieved the milestone.  This adds Japanese to the list of 5 Wikipedias with over half a million articles (the other four are English, German, French and Polish).

I’m especially pleased to announce that Wikimedia Commons has uploaded 3 million files, as of July 16, 2008.  The three-millionth file is a photo of a subway station in Taipei, uploaded by Singapore Wikimedian Mailer Diablo, especially interesting as the millionth file uploaded in November 2006 was also a Wikimedian in Singapore, Terence Ong.

Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator

(contributed by Kizu Naoko [user:Aphaia] from the Foundation Communications Committee)

On 25th June, around 12:36 UTC (21:36 in the Japan Standard Time), Japanese Wikipedia has reached its 500,000 article milestone and has become the first non-European and non-Latin script Wikipedia to pass
over this milestone. The exact 500,000th article is unknown but is very likely one of the following:

フランク・ラザフォード (Frank Rutherford),

国際チャレンジデー (International Challenge Day),

ウエストバージニアの水運 (West Virginia Waterways) or

南阿蘇鉄道MT-2000形気動車 (South Aso Rail Line MT-2000 Diesel Engine).

While this wiki was set up in mid 2001 already, its activities began substantially years later, late 2002, and has steadily been growing. Now it is the 5th biggest Wikipedia and still one of fastest growing Wikimedia projects. In Japan, where the most Japanese speakers dwell, Japanese Wikipedia is known as one of major online references. In 2007  2.7 million people in Japan, roughly over 20% of the whole population of the nation, used Wikipedia from their home, and the number of users has steadily growing since 2005 when the first research was done,  CNET Japan reports.

With a degree of friendly rivalry, the Japanese Wikipedia chases sibling project, Polish Wikipedia, which is 4th largest and reached half a million articles in May. Both projects continue to show steady growth.

The Polish Wikipedia is 9th of the most popular sites in Poland (April 2008). New stats (look on the graph):

http://www.webinside.pl/news/5001

Every day volunteers write ~300 new articles, with average size 1,5 kb

pl wiki (the Polish Wikipedia) has 340 featured articles and more than 200 good articles.

In the beginning of 2008 the Polish Wikipedia started schools and university projects. The first 4 ended with good results (interview with prof. Czachorowski – Polish entomologist, who started 2 projects).

01.07. 2008 will be started new initiative “Holidays with Wikipedia” Wikipedians will work for better quality and they will invite (by sitenotice) readers to collaboration.

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Congratulations to the Polish and Japanese Wikipedia editors!  May the friendly rivalry continue, and here’s to doubling this milestone in the next few years.<