August 7, 2007
Wikipedia Nears the 2-Million Mark
Now that the English-language version of Wikipedia has accumulated nearly two million articles, the site is running short on “low-hanging fruit” — important subjects that haven’t yet been honored with entries of their own. Now that most of its dead-end red links have been replaced with real content, where does the online encyclopedia head next?
Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder, considers that question in an interview with The New York Times:
I remember when Africa was a red link. And you could click on Africa and you could type, “Africa is a continent,” hit save, and you were the pioneer who discovered Africa. Obviously now that is not true anymore.
For nearly two million topics in English there already is some kind of an article. And it gets to be problematic in some areas, if you think philosophically, how many articles could there legitimately be in Wikipedia. That’s a question I am smart enough never to answer.
While most of Wikipedia’s obvious articles have already been written, Mr. Wales says, there’s still plenty of work to be done: Entries need to be honed, relatively obscure biographies can be created, and battles over contemporary figures and topics are constantly being fought. —Brock Read
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This encyclopedia isn’t even close to finishing the serious topics in which it’s still deficient. Take the Fortune 1000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_1000), for example. A quick glance shows that about 15% of the thousand largest American corporations are still missing from Wikipedia. And there are about 18,000 more publicly-traded companies to work on after that.
It’s too bad there wasn’t some kind of “MyWikiBiz.com” that could have written articles on behalf of those notable corporations, maybe in exchange for a modest fee.
— Gregory Kohs Aug 7, 09:34 PM #
I’m surprised that more educators and professors haven’t used Wikipedia as a way to provide students with authentic research opportunities, giving them a real audience for their research. I think it’s a great teaching tool, and you can have groups collaborate on articles.
— Kim Long Aug 8, 08:32 AM #