Archive:Past events

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

March 2005

Wikiquote reaches 10,000 articles.
As of March 25, Wikiquote has 10,000 articles in total, 21 months after its inception on July 2003.

Other Wikimedia project milestones on March -- 100 articles: Sicilian Wikipedia, Ossetian Wikipedia, Berton Wikipedia, Polish Wikinews, Armenian Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikiquote and Georgian Wikipedia. 1,000 articles: Thai Wikipedia.

The second issue of the Wikimedia Quarto was released.
Wikimedia Quarto, covering the last quarter of 2004, was released last Saturday, March 19. The Wikimedia Quarto was begun in September 2004 as the official newsletter of the Wikimedia Foundation. For this issue, Quarto editor-in-chief Samuel Klein tracked down Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, founder and chairman of w:en:Creative Commons, for an exclusive interview. In a whirlwind session, Lessig talked about copyright, copyleft, barriers to free culture, legal pitfalls for Wikipedia, and fighting the good fight. Florence Devouard.

Wikimedia server was down for several hours on 17 March.
On 17 March there was read only service for several hours after a disk drive used for logging on the master database server became full. Monitoring tools showed combined space for all drives and the last human check of that drive alone showed apparently sufficient space available. Improved montoring and larger disk drives are being obtained. James Day

More downtime analysis.

Wikimédia France launches officially.
Wikimédia France, the french chapter of Wikimedia, has been officially created and recognized as a non-profit entity. The chapter can now open bank accounts, be brought to courts by disgruntled trolls, and offer tax breaks to donors. A vote for membership fees has been completed. Amendments to the bylaws are being written for next month's General Assembly, at the end of the intiial 6-month transition period. -Nicolas Weeger

Jimmy Wales asked for more developers at the FOSDEM 2005 conference in Brussels.
As the opening speaker at the FOSDEM conference, Jimmy appealed to the development community for support in running the technical side of Wikipedia, and his remarks were published in several places last week. read more... -Michael Snow

Thank you for your generosity - first fund drive of 2005 a phenomenal success.
After all sources were added together, we had brought in the equivalent of US$94,648.70 (26% more than our goal of $75.000). We reached this amount in 11 days. 21% of the total (15,254.66 Euros, or US$20,046.15) was via Wikimedia Deutschland. For detailed fund drive statistics, see Fund drives/2005/Q1.

Thank you for your generosity. Daniel Mayer, Wikimedia CFO.

More fund drive analysis.

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 Beesley 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.

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.