5 Years of Wikipedia!
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, turned 5 years old January 15, 2006.
The English Wikipedia alone now has more than 920,000 articles, with over 340,000,000 words. The millionth article is expected to appear in late February or early March. The combined Wikipedias for all languages have an estimated total of over 3,100,000 articles in some two hundred languages. Eighty-four of the non-English Wikipedias have over 1,000 articles, thirty-six have over 10,000 and seven have over 100,000.
For a few days now, Wikipedia has been listed on Alexa as the 20th most popular website in the world (one week average). The current trend should see it entering the top ten this year.
129 new servers were purchased during 2005, bringing the total to 171.[1] The Wikimedia cluster has had to be moved to another facility (also in Tampa, Florida) to obtain more space. Wikimedia now has three auxiliary server clusters, in Paris, Amsterdam and Seoul.
Though Wikipedians are celebrating, the future of Wikipedia has come into question over the last year with numerous negative stories in the media, and internal political strife. News focused on studies which found Wikipedia to have a slightly lower article accuracy than Britannica and incidents of patently false articles which have drawn international attention and criticism. In 2005 many new tools had to be introduced to deal with the growing incidents of vandalism, but have had little effect other than to keep the rate of vandalism steady. The vandalism coupled with questions about whether or not Wikipedia can ever serve as a trustworthy reference source means that 2006 will likely be a challenging and important year for the Project.