Wikipedia how many articles

Wikipedia is available in dozens of languages, but its English-language version has the most number of articles. Following the English edition, which hit 5 million articles in late , are Cebuano Wikipedia with over 5. You can see the full list here. Around that time, Wikipedians achieved their most impressive feat of leaderless collective organization—one, it turns out, that set in motion the decline in participation that troubles their project today.

At some time in , the established editors began to feel control of the site slipping from their grasp. As the number of new contributions—well-meaning and otherwise—was growing, the task of policing them all for quality began to feel impossible. High-profile incidents such as the posting of a defamatory hoax article about the journalist John Seigenthaler raised serious questions about whether crowdsourcing an encyclopedia, or anything else, could ever work.

As is typical with Wikipedians, a response emerged from a mixture of cordial discussions, tedious arguments, and online wrestling matches—but it was sophisticated. They created software that allowed fellow editors to quickly survey recent changes and reject them or admonish their authors with a single mouse click.

The tough new measures worked. Vandalism was brought under control, and hoaxes and scandals became less common. Newly stabilized, and still growing in scope and quality, the encyclopedia became embedded in the firmament of the Web. Today the English Wikipedia has 4. But those tougher rules and the more suspicious atmosphere that came along with them had an unintended consequence. Newcomers to Wikipedia making their first, tentative edits—and the inevitable mistakes—became less likely to stick around.

Being steamrollered by the newly efficient, impersonal editing machine was no fun. The number of active editors on the English-language Wikipedia peaked in at more than 51, and has been declining ever since as the supply of new ones got choked off. This past summer only 31, people could be considered active editors. The results paint a numerical picture of a community dominated by bureaucracy. Over the same period, the proportion of those deletions made by automated tools rather than humans grew.

Unsurprisingly, the data also indicate that well-intentioned newcomers are far less likely to still be editing Wikipedia two months after their first try. Because Wikipedia has failed to replenish its supply of editors, its skew toward technical, Western, and male-dominated subject matter has persisted. In , researchers from the University of Minnesota and three other schools showed that articles worked on mostly by female editors—which presumably were more likely to be of interest to women—were significantly shorter than those worked on mostly by male editors or by men and women equally.

Another study, from the University of Oxford, found that 84 percent of entries tagged with a location were about Europe or North America. Antarctica had more entries than any nation in Africa or South America. But after a few minutes discussing the issue, it is clear that she believes Wikipedia needs help.

One idea being tested offers newcomers suggestions about what to work on, steering them toward easy tasks such as copyediting articles that need it. The hope is this will give people time to gain confidence before they break a rule and experience the tough side of Wikipedia. These might seem like small changes, but it is all but impossible for the foundation to get the community to support bigger adjustments.

Nothing exemplifies this better than the effort to introduce the text editing approach that most people are familiar with: the one found in everyday word processing programs. It rolled out in a site-wide trial in July, with the expectation that it would soon become a permanent fixture. After the foundation made Visual Editor the default way to edit entries, Wikipedians rebelled and complained of bugs in the software. In September, a Request for Comment, a survey of the community, concluded that the new interface should be hidden by default.

The foundation gave in. It made Visual Editor opt-in rather than opt-out—meaning that the flagship project to help newcomers is in fact invisible to newcomers, unless they dig through account settings to switch the new interface on.

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