Archive:Past events

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

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.
• 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 ([1]) 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.[2] 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.