Wikipedia Hits 1,000,000

Slashdot reports that Wikipedia, the online, user-edited encyclopedia, has reached its one-millionth article today at 6:09pm EST. The article is about the Jordanhill Railway Station.

Here are few highlights that caught my attention in the Slashdot thread:

• znx writes, Even if you consider only 10% of the wiki as "useful content", that still means 100,000 articles. Which is just below that of Encyclopedia Britannica (which was established way back in 1768!). This is a milestone along the way, the wikipedia isn't perfect but it is a great project that should be celebrated for its success.
  
  
• fm6 writes, I find it interesting that the "official" one millionth article is one of those obscure geographical articles that help justify Wikipedia's existence. It's the sort of narrow topic that old-fashioned encylopedias would never get to, but which is actually useful to certain people. But it's a little strange that the counter hit 1 million on such an article. By percentages it should have been a vanity article, a topic that exists mainly in the mind of the author, or a summary of a TV episode.
  
  
• niktemadur writes, 1,000,000 articles in English. If you take all articles in all languages, Wikipedia surpassed the magic number a long time ago, and has by now actually gone beyond 2,000,000 articles.
  

Also, interestingly enough, Wikipedia user Mészáros András predicted that today (i.e., March 1, 2006) would see the official authorship of Wikipedia's one-millionth article.

The count to one-million does not include redirects and stubs. If those were included, Wikipedia would have over 2.5 million articles.

There is of course the expected debate (seeing as it is a Slashdot thread) on the value, accuracy, and reliability of Wikipedia. One Slashdotter posted a link to Uncyclopedia, a parody of Wikipedia with the slogan "The content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," compared to Wikipedia's slogan "The free encyclopedia than anyone can edit."