Ten years ago today, Jimmy Wales typed Hello World! into a wiki, and Wikipedia was born.

Today, Wikipedia’s the fifth most-popular site on the internet, and the only site in the top 25 that provides a wholly non-commercial public service, backed by a non-profit. It’s the largest collection of information ever assembled in human history: free to use, and free of advertising. If you’re reading it, it’s for you :-)

The anniversary’s an opportunity for us all to reflect on Wikipedia: its social impact, and what we want to accomplish in the next ten years. There’s been a lot of thoughtful media coverage over the past few weeks: you can read a lot of it here.

What makes me happy about the coverage is that it seems like people’s attitudes towards Wikipedia have finally turned an important corner.

In its early years, Wikipedia was one of our culture’s dirty little secrets: everybody used it, but very few were comfortable saying so. For the longest time, the only people who openly admitted loving Wikipedia were early adopters and iconoclasts.

Today though, journalists, educators and culture critics are finally embracing Wikipedia, acknowledging that its strengths vastly outweigh its weaknesses, and that its fundamental premise works. (A reporter told me the other day that mocking Wikipedia is “so 2007.” LOL.)

So today, we celebrate all the people who built this extraordinary thing. The engineers who made the code. The people who write the articles, fix the typos, smooth the text, localize the software, answer readers’ mail, and fight off vandals and POV-pushers. The donors, who pay the bills.

I invite you to check out this page, where there are listed (at last count) 454 Wikipedia anniversary parties, conferences, film screenings and other events. If you can come to one –even if you’ve never edited or even ever met a Wikipedian– please do!

And if you can’t be with us in person, why not do a little celebratory editing? Wikipedia wants your help: here’s a really great place to get started.

Thank you to everyone who’s helped to build Wikipedia. What you’ve done is amazing. Happy anniversary!

Sue Gardner, Executive Director

Today we’ve seen a wide range of media outlets around the world cover the news about Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary.  Some stories recount the history of the project from its humble beginnings, and others collect the viewpoints of big thinkers on the topic of web and technology.  The Foundation’s Executive Director also published an op-ed piece in the Guardian that looks into the project and its pioneer beginnings. It’s wonderful to see so many media outlets, blogs, and great institutions probe deeply into the stories of Wikipedia, and start to ask big questions about Wikipedia’s considerable impact on society and the internet.

Wikipedia 10 celebrators around the world are documenting the coverage on ten.wikipedia.org, a wiki specially created for the occasion. Some of the highlights of the day:

The Times of India out of Bangalore discusses Wikipedia’s push for more local language content.

The Atlantic from New York prepared a wide-ranging package of content about the anniversary, including insights from Wikimedia advisory board members Craig Newmark, Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, and Ethan Zuckerman.

Read Write Web asks readers what Wikipedia will look like in ten years.

The Washington Post featured a lengthy piece on the history and future of Wikipedia, including an interview with Jimmy Wales.

Italy’s La Repubblica covered the occasion, and made a visit to the Foundation’s San Francisco offices earlier this week.

Wired UK and the US Wired are in the midst of ‘Wikipedia week‘ and have included some great Wikipedia lists.

The Guardian‘s feature op-ed by Wikimedia ED Sue Gardner ran earlier today.

We’ll update the media coverage page over the next week as more global coverage emerges, and as we cross the threshold of the big anniversary.

Jay Walsh
Communications

We’re only a few days away from celebrating Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary on Saturday, January 15th, and today the Wikimedia Foundation has officially announced it to the world.

Recently, I let you know that there were about 65 events happening. Today, there are more than 300. That growth is amazing, and as usual the dedication and creativity of the volunteers that make Wikipedia work is nothing short of astounding.

Numbers alone really fail to tell the story of just what we’re doing to commemorate “Wikipedia Day” in 2011 though. Of the hundreds of events on six continents, they all demonstrate a passion for free knowledge. Many more events combine our movement’s unique mission with activities that really suit the local community. From a Campus Party in São Paulo to a workshop and kite flying festival in Bangladesh, all of these events are powerful examples of the diversity we’re striving for in our movement. Many of these events have their own localized 10th anniversary designs – the Chinese Wikipedia 10 logo on this post is one.

I encourage you to browse the full list of events on ten.wikipedia.org, and to include editors, readers, and donors as you reflect on Wikipedia’s first 10 years. Wherever or however you choose to celebrate, this is a historic moment, and we’d like to thank you for making it happen.

Steven Walling
Community Dept. Fellow

Congratulations to Ukrainian Wikipedia on reaching 250,000 articles! The milestone article was officially created on Tuesday, December 21 at 8:45pm, Kyiv Time by user Anatoliy-024.  Anatoily-024, a Wikipedian since 2008, has created 206 articles and made 6,000 edits to the Ukranian Wikipedia making this user the 110^th most active contributor to this language Wikipedia.

Since it started in 2004, Ukranian Wikipedia has grown at a steady rate, adding 50,000 articles in just the last nine months, making it the sixteenth largest language Wikipedia.  This year, the Ukrainian encyclopedia experienced a 64 percent increase in page views– 860,000 people have viewed 30 million articles in December alone.

The wonderful thing about this accomplishment is that each bit of information found on Wikipedia has been included by volunteers– everyday people committed to sharing free information with others.  Although Wikipedia is available in over 270 languages, only 35 language Wikipedias have reached the 100,000 article milestone.  It’s important that more people join the movement and contribute to this valuable, public resource.

We thank all the volunteers who helped Ukranian Wikipedia advance this far.  We hope that others will take the time to join them!

Moka Pantages

Communications

This week we watched our projects hit two big milestones.  Russian Wikipedia has just slipped past the 500,000 article mark.  It continues to remain in the top ten largest Wikipedia.  Wikinews has a short write-up on the achievement, and thankfully explains why Russian Wikipedians are celebrating the milestone with… a lemon (or half a lemon).

Also this week we saw the cumulative total for all Wikipedia articles, across all languages, cross the astonishing 15,000,000 mark.  You can see the live-updated data on the volunteer-created Wikistats page (bookmark for frequent statistical wonderment and of course Erik Zachte’s essential-reading, stats.wikimedia.org). For the last few months we were excited to say we had broken 14,000,000.  Just when we got this number in our heads, another million articles flood in.

Both are incredible achievements, demonstrating the continuing and sustained growth of our projects across hundreds of languages.  Congratulations to all of the project contributors.

Jay Walsh, Communications

On this day in 2001, Wikipedia, a small, experimental project with a big mission was introduced to the world by Founder Jimmy Wales. Nine years later, growing at unprecedented speed, due to the dedicated and enthusiastic support of volunteers and contributors, Wikipedia has evolved into one of the most important sources of free information and knowledge in the world.  Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

In 2002, only celebrating one year of existence, Wikipedia grew to over 20,000 articles– and in its second year,  130,000 articles in 28 languages. To wax nostalgic, you can turn back the hands of time and rummage through “vintage” Wikipedia here. Since then, over 14 million articles in 270 languages have been created.  For millions of people everywhere, Wikipedia has become an indispensable part of their daily lives– a resource relied on by hundreds of millions of  visitors a month — and growing.

In celebration of this milestone, Wikipedians in Bangalore, India and New York City have planned events.  If you’re celebrating with us, post a comment and tell us how, or even better, add photos to Wikimedia Commons.

Thanks, Wikipedia! Here’s to another year wiser!

Moka Pantages, Communications

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