Nearing 2 million on en.wp (updated 2x)
UPDATE: It’s done. Based on the logs, it looks like number two million is El Hormiguero, about a Spanish television show. (If you saw the clip of the people walking across the non-Newtonian fluid on YouTube: that’s the show.)
Another update: Found a log listing articles with the count. You’ll have to scroll a bit to find El Hormiguero.
I’ve been refreshing the English Wikipedia stats page every so often to follow the progress. As I type this, there are 1,995,085 articles — less than 5000 to go before we reach two million. We should get there within a few days, especially if the “ZOMG I WANT TO BE THE ONE TO WRITE #2,000,000″ fever strikes like it did just before enwiki hit 1M.
The pace of growth is slowing — it’s more linear than exponential now — so it should be a while before enwiki gets to three million articles. Still, enwiki users have just written one million encyclopedia articles in just over 18 months. (Mind you, not all of them are good encyclopedia articles; there is always work to be done on the quality front.)
Good timing on this, too; the Wikimedia Foundation is just about to start a fundraising drive, and the 2M publicity should help remind potential donors in the English-speaking world about the value of WMF projects.
(A quick note: the count on [[Special:Statistics]] does not include redirects, empty or blanked articles, deleted articles, articles without internal wikilinks, or pages outside the main namespace (like Talk: or User: pages). As pages are edited, their counted/uncounted status may change; because pages are continually being edited, that count fluctuates somewhat from one moment to the next.)
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“…reach two million. We should get there within a few days, especially if the “ZOMG I WANT TO BE THE ONE TO WRITE #2,000,000″ fever strikes like it did just before enwiki hit 1M.”
Well, remember that creation slowed down a wee bit before 1M as some of the more prolific folks began stockpiling articles (like myself). It was the last minute or 2 which were truly epic.
Hmm, very true, gwern. I had forgotten about that; thanks for reminding me!
There was also a lot of trolling in the homestretch, now that you mention it. Nothing too harsh – remember, the trolls were trying to be fast, not effective – but still.