Archive:Past events

These are events around Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. See also current events.

February 2005

• On February 22, two circuit breakers blew, removing power from most of the Wikimedia servers and leading to the loss of all service for several hours, no editing for most of a day and slowness for a week. Full recovery of database robustness took the better part of a month. Uninterruptible power supplies could have reduced the effect of this incident (but not all power incidents; law requires an emergency power-off switch, which has caused outages for other sites, most notably for LiveJournal not long ago). Additional UPS systems will be used for key systems, fire code willing. -James Day

• The Foundation began its second global fundraising drive on February 18. It was planned to continue until March 11 or until the goal of 75,000 USD was reached. The fund drive was stopped after 11 days, but donations continued to come in, exceeding the goal by 26% once all were totalled up. Thanks to everyone who contributed! Details and daily breakdowns are available: Fund drives/2005/Q1.

• The Hebrew Wikipedia received an Honor Certificate from the Israeli Internet Society and the National Society for Volunteering in Israel, in honor of its voluntary activity on the Internet for the benefit of man and society. Check out the Honor Certificate Image (in Hebrew).

• The German Wikipedia reached 200,000 articles.
• The Japanese Wikipedia reached 100,000 articles.

• The Belarusan Wikipedia reaches 1000 articles.

• The Aragonese Wikipedia reached 100 articles.
• The Latvian Wikipedia reaches 1000 articles.

• The Italian Wiktionary reached 10,000 articles.
• The Russian Wiktionary reached 1,000 articles.
• The Hindi Wiktionary reached 1,000 articles.
• The Estonian Wiktionary reached 1,000 articles.

• German Wikibooks reached 200 books in 1300 chapters.

• The Wikisource reaches 10,000 pages with Japanese language document 北海道舊土人保護法, about a Japanese law.

• Polish, Portuguese, and Romanian editions of Wikinews are set up: See also Wikinews portal

January 2005

• Two benefactors: Lounsbery Foundation grants us 40,000 USD. Lost Oasis hosts three of our servers for free in Paris. See Benefactors and report on Wikimedia Quarto for further information.

• On January 15, Wikipedia celebrated its 4th birthday. English Wikipedia celebrated this day with its 450,000th article.

• Other significant milestones of Wikimedia projects reached on January 2005 are as following: 100 articles: Limburgish Wikipedia, 500 articles: Hindi Wiktionary, 1,000 articles: Portuguese Wiktionary, Hindi Wikipedia, 2,500 articles: Simple English Wikipedia, 5,000 articles: Czech Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, 50,000 articles: Dutch Wikipedia, 450,000 articles

• Dutch, French, Spanish and Swedish Wikinews were created.

• Several wikimedia projects set multilingual portals.

December 2004

• All Wikimedia project has been powered by MediaWiki1.4beta
• A completely rewritten spam filter has been incorporated into MediaWiki, which blocks URLs containing certain domains and words. The new filter comes with a greatly expanded blacklist, derived from the publically available Wikiblacklist (now moved to [1]).
• All Wiktionaries became unaccessible because its domain name was expired. The problem was solved on December 17 and Wiktionary regained its connectivity.

• The Polish Wikipedia reached 50,000 articles.
• The Russian Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles.
• The Hindi Wikipedia reached 500 articles.
• The Latvian Wikipedia reached 500 articles.
• The Romanian Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles.
• With the Romanian milestone, 20 Wikipedias now contain over 10,000 articles. Wikistats has up-to-date size comparisons.
• The Indonesian Wikipedia reached 5000 articles.
• The Sicilian wikipedia reached 100 articles.

• Croatian Wiktionary reached 100 entries.
• Galician wiktionary reached 10,000 articles.

• The reached 100 articles.
• reached 100 articles.

• reached 1000 chapters (in 124 books).

• The English Wikinews project has left the demo stage and now resides at http://en.wikinews.org - more languages will follow soon.
• The German Wikinews project started at http://de.wikinews.org.

November 2004

• In Rotterdam the first Wikipedia Symposium was held. It was a great success, with over 40 people present, among which were were three trustees, Jimmy Wales, Angela Beesly and Florence Nibart Devouard.

• Wikipedia.org is the 172nd most visited site on the Internet according to Alexa.com.

• The English Wikipedia reached 8.00 average edits per page, suggesting increasing quality even with increasing quantity.
• The English Wikipedia has over 1 million total pages (over a third are legitimate articles).

• The Greek Wikipedia reached 2,500 articles.
• Italian Wikipedia reached 30,000 articles.
• Korean Wikipedia reached 5000 articles.
• Kannada Wikipedia reached 100 articles.
• Italian wiktionary reached 1000 articles.
• Swedish Wikipedia reached 50.000 articles.
• Catalan wikipedia reached 10,000 articles.
• Ukrainian wikipedia reached 10,000 articles.
• The swedish Wikipedia became the world's seventh biggest wiki, by page count.

• The Portuguese Wiktionary had reached 500 articles.
• The English Wiktionary reached 50,000 articles.
• The Dutch Wiktionary has its 1000th word in the Dutch language. There are 7129 articles and 233 languages.
• The Gujarati Wiktionary reached 100 articles.

• The Polish Wikiquote reached 500 articles.

• The English Wikibooks reached 5,000 modules.

October 2004

• We have exceeded our goal of raising 50,000 dollars in two weeks. Thanks to all who donated!
• The location of Wikimania 2005 was determined to be Frankfurt am Main.
• The French chapter had its inaugural meeting ([2]) in Paris and via the Wiki and IRC and elected its board members.
• Vala, a user of the Italian Wikipedia, graduated in sociology with a thesis on Wikipedia. She graduated "summa cum laude". This is the first time in Italy that a thesis on this subject has been discussed.

The 1000th WikiCommons file

• Images on Wikimedia Commons can now be linked to like local images.

• Wikipedia.org's daily Alexa rank hits 218 - a new record.[3] See m:Wikipedia.org is more popular than....
• There has been a huge spike in traffic over the last two days leading to slower than normal load times. Our previous Alexa ranking record was 349 on September 22nd; we climbed to 260.

• The Southern Min Wikipedia reached 500 articles.
• The Finnish Wikipedia reached 10 000 articles (Press release in Finnish)
• The Lithuanian Wikipedia reached 1000 articles.
• The Norwegian Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles (Press release in Norwegian)
• The Sanskrit Wikipedia reached 1,000 articles.
• Bulgarian Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles.
• The Polish Wikipedia reached 40,000 articles.

• The Hindi Wiktionary reached 100 articles.
• ウィクショナリー, the Japanese Wiktionary, has passed 1,000 words.

• WikiCommons reached 1000 uploaded files (mostly images, but also over 100 sound fragments and 1 movie).

September 2004

• The Foundation begins a two week Fundraising drive with the aim of raising $50,000.
• Publication of the Foundation Wikimedia, Inc Newsletter: Wikimedia Quarto

• Wikipedia reaches a total of one million articles across all languages. See the international press release.