Controversy
Political controversy became a major focus of editorial policy in mid-2002 - Larry Sanger returned after his resignation to wade in to the following:
In March 2002, the user "24" (named after his internet address) began to make a large number of controversial edits. Discussions about these edits became heated, and many people felt that 24, while knowledgable about various topics, was unable to work well with others. After posting what was perceived as a threat against Larry Sanger, Jimbo Wales banned his IP from the site for two days in April 2002 after lengthy debate on the mailing list. Many of his contributions remain in the encyclopedia.
"H.J." was banned from Wikipedia in September 2002. See for details.
Consolidation
- Summer 2002: Phase III software
- Standard presentations for chemical elements & biological species
- Manual of Style: efforts to standardize presentation across wikipedia
- 40,000 reached
- 50,000 reached
- October 2002:
- the random page bugs causes everyone to land on unexpeccted pages
- pagecount leaps up to 70k with the bot-creation of pages for US towns from census data. This was controversial and lead to much discussion about the use of bots.
- December 2002:
- December 10: Article count jumps over 100 000 articles due to bugs in the counter; corrected back to 93 301.
- December 12: Wiktionary, the parallel lexical project to Wikipedia is launched. Wikipedians telling people that "Wikipedia is not a dictionary" now point people to the sister project.
Reflection
- January 2003:
- Wikipedia3 and Wikipedia4 discussions begin, timelines proposed
- January 15 - second anniversary. Shortly thereafter, 100,000 article mark is passed (an article is defined as a file with a comma in it, ruling out redirects or simple lists). 1,000,000 page views also passed about this time.
- February 2003:
- February 1 - coverage of disaster appears in more or less real time, much like the 9/11 editing flood, with facts entered from the news. Background articles on space exploration, national space programs and the like appear. Suggestion that Wikews (Wiki news) might be viable project.
- February 26 - coverage begins to attempt to comprehensively list reputed impacts and outcomes of the crisis, e.g. credibility of the , re-election prospects for in the , growth in the worldwide. This coverage is carefully kept skin-deep to avoid anticipating events or reporting overly speculative predictions. This experiment in issue-tracking without implying credibility or lack thereof is a delicate mix of news and encyclopedia functions, and sets some precedents for handling scheduled and anticipated future events of great political importance. Future of Wikipedia takes a similar approach to guiding the evolution of the project.
- March 2003:
- invasion of the "endless, pointless lists", e.g. album listings and weird lists about songs with certain properties in their titles. Even more silly lists created by people satirizing the creation of silly lists. Of course, what constitutes a "silly list" varied from person to person. Older lists such as and provoked protest as well.
- Seeding of other projects: The wikipedia phase 3 software is used for several other projects including Internet Encyclopedia (a non-NPOV alternative). , are not forks, but a widening of the ground covered - Disinfopedia is concerned with exposing propaganda, and Consumerium with enabling moral purchasing. None competes directly with Wikipedia.
- Iraq war causes news capacity to develop. Wikipedia becomes an important point of consolidation of information from alternative news and little-read-but-reliable sources. are compiled in advance of the invasion, enabling later comparison with the .
- June 2003:
- Consensus begins to develop on how to deal with claims and thinking regarding in the text of the Wikipedia. Main issue: how each language version can develop on its own and collaborate on meta, and remain coordinated.
- Jim Wales announces formation of Wikimedia to recruit a board and write a board manual to help them manage an ever-growing Wikipedia with 600 regular contributors, and over 7000 occasionals. He first reveals his commitment to this plan in an article pulished on .
- July 2003:
- On July 15, Andrew Lih ("") set 80 Hong Kong University students loose on Wikipedia, with an assignment to write articles on Hong Kong related topics. The students were well received, and quickly found their work being edited and discussed by regular Wikipedians. On August 4, CNN aired a report on the experiment, on their TechWatch segment.
- October/November 2003:
- In an attempt to take some of the pressure off "benevolent dictator" Jimbo Wales's shoulders, as well as reduce the number of Wikipedia's single points of failure and make Wikipedia more democratic, two committees, the and are set up. Members of the mediation committee are tasked with helping users find amicable solutions to arising problems. The arbitration committee is equipped with more powers and can make binding decisions, such as to ban users.
- On Oct 12, the English Wikipedia switched to the Nohat logo (Logo history)
- Late 2003
- The non-english Wikipedias are collectively bigger than the English Wikipedia for the first time. The All-Wikipedia total of 350,000 articles is reached before the English Wikipedia total gains the 175,000 mark.
Hitting the big time?
- Christmas 2003
- A major computer crash prompts Jimbo Wales to launch a fund-raising drive. In less than a week more than $30,000 is raised, thanks partly to another healthy dose of publicity on Slashdot. The money allows nine new computers to be purchased. These are brought online during January 2004, and as a result the location of the Wikimedia computers moves from San Diego to Florida, within an hour of Jimbo's home, allowing a better emergency response in the future. The editing and viewing experience is dramatically improved. (Full explanation of new server set-up at Wikimedia servers).
- January 2004
- English Wikipedia hits 200,000 articles, just over a year after hitting 100,000. A further slashdotting occurs, but Wikipedia rides the extra traffic with a barely a hint of a slow down. See Milestones.
- February 2004
- 500,000 articles across all Wikipedias is reached. Non-English Wikipedias are now growing much more rapdily than English. A world-wide press release is released on February 25 2004 to announce this fact. The response is particularly good in Germany, with features in a major newspaper and TV news programme.
- February 2004
- Yahoo! announces that Wikipedia is included in their Public Site Match arm of their Content Acquistion Programme, meaning that Wikipedia content will be indexed more often and featured prominently on Yahoo! pages. Wikipedia features alongside the Library of Congress and National Public Radio archives as a quality provider of free resources in the press release. Yahoo!'s press release.
- February 2004
- On February 26 2004 Jimbo Wales announces on the mailing list ([1]) that he has been approached by a major publisher to create a cut-down print edition of the English Wikipedia. Technical possibilities and difficulties abound. The target date for publication is October 2004.
- February 2004
- The first full month at the new server location with all nine new machines available sees a massive increase in traffic to the site. Around 660GB of data are served in February from the English Wikipedia alone across 77 million hits. It is very likely that more than 1TB was served across all Wikipedias for the first time. En also now has over 50,000 registered usernames. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/stats/.
- April 2004 - The English Wikipedia reaches a quarter of a million articles.
Rewarded
- May 4, 2004
- Wikipedia wins a in the category Digital Communities. A five-figure cash pile is reported to come as part of the prize.
- May 12, 2004
- Wikipedia wins a in the category Community. No free money is reported to be forthcoming.
