English Wikipedia hits one million articles
The English Wikipedia reached the long-awaited milestone of one million encyclopedia articles on Wednesday, a little over five years after the launch of the community-written reference work in January, 2001. The encyclopedia passed this mark at precisely 23:09 (UTC) on 1 March, 2006. The millionth article was Jordanhill railway station, added by Wikipedian Ewan Macdonald (aka User:Nach0king) in the course of his ongoing work on Scottish railways.
The Wikimedia Foundation immediately issued a press release ("English Wikipedia Publishes Millionth Article"), and the news was reported on Slashdot within hours. (see more press coverage)
The winner of the Wikipedia:Million pool, a contest to guess the date on which the millionth article would be written, was Hungarian Wikipedian András Mészáros, who made his prediction on 28 November, 2004. With the reaching of the million milestone, the Wikipedia:Two-million pool is now closed.
Some near-contenders for the title of millionth article were:
- 999,996 Bobby Smith (baseball player)
- 999,997 Temporal coding
- 999,998 Steve Cox
- 999,999 One million articles
- 1,000,000 Jordanhill railway station
- 1,000,001 Squidoo
- 1,000,002 Tennessee Commissioner of Financial Institutions
- 1,000,003 Aaron Ledesma
- 1,000,004 Cellular architecture
Because of the problems in identifying the half-millionth article (see archived story), developers Tim Starling and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason were prepared with precise monitoring tools this time.
Many competitive editors had articles queued up to submit as the big number approached. Clearly one of these was BorgHunter, who created eight different articles within the minute the milestone was reached. Not only Smith, but Cox, Ledesma, and several others were his, all baseball players with some connection to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (coincidentally, the professional team closest to Wikimedia headquarters). According to Raul654, "the article count jumped from 999,990 to 1,000,150 in one second. I've never seen anything like it."