The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the 1,000,000th article in the English language edition of Wikipedia.
The article is about the Jordanhill railway station in Scotland, and it was started by Wikipedia contributor Ewan Macdonald. Wikipedia is a free, multilingual, online encyclopedia with 3.3 million articles under development in more than 125 languages.
The full text of the English Wikipedia is located at en.wikipedia.org.
In addition to articles, the English Wikipedia offers dozens of
graphical timelines and subject-specific portals. Its media repository
includes four hundred thousand images and hundreds of full-length
songs, videos, and animations, many of which are available for free
distribution.
Although its method of editing is new and controversial, Wikipedia
has already won acclaim and awards for its detailed coverage of current
events, popular culture, and scientific topics; its usability; and its
international community of contributors. BBC News has called Wikipedia "One of the most reliably useful sources of information around, on or off-line." Daniel Pink, author and WIRED Magazine
columnist, has described Wikipedia as "the self-organizing,
self-repairing, hyperaddictive library of the future," and Tim
Berners-Lee, father of the Web, has called it "The Font of All
Knowledge."
Wikipedia is among the world’s most popular websites, receiving tens
of millions of visitors every day. It is a project of the Wikimedia
Foundation, and has spawned sister projects, including a dictionary, a
library of textbooks, a compendium of quotations, a news site, and a
media repository. These projects are all run using the open source MediaWiki software.
Other articles created within the same minute included an overview of the Tennessee Commissioner of Financial Institutions, a biography of baseball player Aaron Ledesma, and a look at cellular architecture.
