Wikimedia press releases/English Wikipedia hits milestone 1 million articles/text

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        English Wikipedia Publishes Millionth Article 
        ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES, March 1, 2006
  
The Wikimedia Foundation announced Wednesday the creation of the 
1,000,000th article in the English language edition of Wikipedia.  
The article is about the Jordanhill railway station 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordanhill_railway_station] in Scotland, 
and was started by Wikipedia contributor Ewan Macdonald 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nach0king]. 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 http://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 
[http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki]. 

Other articles created within the same minute included an overview of the 
Tennessee Commissioner of Financial Institutions
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Commissioner_of_Financial_Institutions], 
a biography of baseball player Aaron Ledesma 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Ledesma], and a look at cellular 
architecture [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cellular_architecture].

== About Wikipedia ==

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free 
access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."  
 --Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation

Started in January 2001, Wikipedia is the world's most current, fastest-growing, 
and largest encyclopedia.  It is created entirely by volunteers who contribute, 
update, and revise articles in a collaborative process.  The English language 
edition contains 20 million internal links, and incorporates 65,000 edits and 
1,700 new articles each day.  

Wikipedia's content is written for a general audience, and is continually 
revised for clarity, readability, and accuracy.  Original text, images and 
sounds contributed to Wikipedia are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation 
Licence (GFDL) [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html#SEC1], which lets users 
copy and modify each other's work based on a principle known as "copyleft."  
The entire database can be freely downloaded in full.

Though the project faced criticism in 2005 for factual inaccuracies in some 
articles, the science journal Nature published a study in December which 
found Wikipedia's science content to have only slightly more errors per article 
than that of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Other, less formal external peer 
reviews have been generally positive. 

== About Wikimedia ==

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an international non-profit organization 
dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, 
multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based 
projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some 
of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world, including 
Wikipedia, one of the 25 most visited websites. Wikipedia and Wikimedia's awards 
include the Webby Award, the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, the Japan 
Advertisers Association's Web Creation Award, and the World Technology Award in 
Communications Technology.

The Wikimedia Foundation was created in 2003 to manage the operation of existing 
projects, and is based in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA.  Wikimedia has local 
chapters in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Serbia and Montenegro, 
and Poland. Chapters in Canada, India, China, Australia and the Netherlands are 
among those currently in development.

Most of the Foundation's operations are funded by reader and contributor 
donations, usually of USD$50 or less.  Its 2005 budget was USD$739,200, and 
based on traffic growth, the 2006 budget is expected to be significantly higher.

== Further information ==

For a digital copy of this press release, or releases in other languages, 
visit the Foundation website: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/PR/1M-EN 

* The Wikimedia Foundation [http://wikimediafoundation.org]
* About Wikipedia''' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia]
* Press coverage [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_coverage]
* Introduction to editing Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction)]
* Wikipedia's best articles [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles]
* External peer reviews [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_peer_review]

== Contact ==

For questions and interviews, please email press@wikimedia.org, or 
(in English only) contact directly:

Jimmy Wales, Chair, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation
  Email: jwales@wikia.com  |  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales
  Phone: +1-310-474-3223

Angela Beesley, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation
  Email: abeesley@wikimedia.org  |  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Angela 
  Phone: (+44)-208-816-7308

Other regional contact are also available at http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room .


== Suggested Images ==

Wikipedia logo without text
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikipedia-logo.png

Wikipedia logo with text
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikipedia-logo-en.png

Jimmy Wales speaking in Brussels in 2005
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Jimbo-wales---fosdem-2005.jpg

Jimmy Wales at "Parc des Buttes Chaumont", a park in Paris.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Jimbo_Wales_in_France_cropped.jpg

Jimmy Wales on the Hohlbeinsteg bridge in Frankfurt, Germany. 
Behind him you can see the river Main and the sky scrapers of Frankfurt.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Jimbo-Frankfurt-skyline.jpeg

Three MediaWiki developers programming at Wikimania, the annual Wikimedia 
Conference, in Frankfurt in 2005.  The 2006 conference will be held at Harvard 
University in Boston. 
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Brion_vibber_developers_at_wikimania.jpg

Wikipedians having dinner in Frankfurt, Germany during Wikimania 2005.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikimania_053.jpg
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