English Wikipedia will reach 7,000,000 articles around 18 December 2025. It currently has 6,890,412 articles.
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bot help Thank you, user who knows the secret to winning the Race Against The Machine, for helpful bots and for cleaning up yourself ("removing WP:OVERLINK to an everyday word"), for redirects and templates such as {{Forms of energy}}, for detailed analysis and offering to serve as arbitrator: "Don't underestimate how far I'm willing to go to read the background", - you are an awesome Wikipedian!
--Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:06, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
11:36, October 3, 2024 BST [refresh] in Great Britain
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Did you know
Martin Luther King's final Sunday sermon referenced the thesis of "The Triple Revolution", which primarily discussed the cybernation revolution of increasing automation, whereby machines would continue reducing the need for manual labor, while increasing the skill needed to work, thereby producing greater unemployment
Much of the work I've done for Wikipedia could be offshored to anywhere, or automated (indeed much is already semi-automated; run my edit history through some machine learning algorithms to automate more)
The total length of expressways in China increased from zero in 1988 to 69,560 miles (111,950 km) at the end of 2014, the world's largest controlled-access highway system by length. The US has 64,352 miles (103,565 km) total – the 47,856 miles (77,017 km) Interstate Highway System plus 16,496 miles of other freeways and expressways (as of 2013, including Puerto Rico).[1]
US public spending on transport and water infrastructure has fallen steadily since the 1960s, and is now at 2.4% of GDP. Europe invests 5% of GDP in infrastructure; China's racing into the future at 9%.[2]
China Spends More on Infrastructure Than the U.S. and Europe Combined! Western countries put less money into roads and bridges now than they did before the global financial crisis. Bloomberg Businessweek.
In 1995, the US was tied for first in the world in the percentage of the population with a college degree. Now the US ranks fourteenth.[3]
^"Life in the slow lane". The Economist. April 28, 2011.
^Madland, David (2015). Hollowed Out: Why the Economy Doesn't Work without a Strong Middle Class. p. 87. ISBN 978-0-520-28652-8.
‘We Need an Energy Miracle’
Bill Gates nails it: Interview by The Atlantic. Something on the order of the Drake Well or Chicago Pile-1. Maybe some computers running genetic programming algorithms will help us find it, before "time runs out". A breakthrough in stellarator or tokamak research could be a game-changer.
Vast shale oil field in Texas could yield 20 billion barrels It seems that "peak oil" has been superseded by "peak unconventional oil", so we will be running "climate experiments" for a while longer...
Vivek Wadhwa thinks Perovskite solar cells could be the solution, along with rapidly improving battery technologies. I highly recommend his book about the near future (ISBN 978-1626569713, it covers a lot more than just cars).
“I hope we can convince the next treasurer to print an equal number of $20 bills with both Jackson and Tubman.” Sounds like a great idea to me. NPOV and all. The last president to pay off our national debt in 1835.
UPDATE: Google has updated data to 2019! The answer is NO! Check back in 10 years to see whether Wikipedia peaked in 2019; its growth curve does seem to be flattening.
Following a discussion, the speedy deletion reason "File pages without a corresponding file" has been moved from criterion G8 to F2. This does not change what can be speedily deleted.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Readers of 42 more wikis can now use Dark Mode. If the option is not yet available for logged-out users of your wiki, this is likely because many templates do not yet display well in Dark Mode. Please use the night-mode-checker tool if you are interested in helping to reduce the number of issues. The recommendations page provides guidance on this. Dark Mode is enabled on additional wikis once per month.
Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor as their default can access features from the 2017 wikitext editor by adding ?veaction=editsource to the URL. If you would like to enable the 2017 wikitext editor as your default, it can be set in your preferences. [1]
For logged-out readers using the Vector 2022 skin, the "donate" link has been moved from a collapsible menu next to the content area into a more prominent top menu, next to "Create an account". This restores the link to the level of prominence it had in the Vector 2010 skin. Learn more about the changes related to donor experiences. [2]
The CampaignEvents extension provides tools for organizers to more easily manage events, communicate with participants, and promote their events on the wikis. The extension has been enabled on Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, and Meta-Wiki. Chinese Wikipedia has decided to enable the extension, and discussions on the extension are in progress on Spanish Wikipedia and on Wikidata. To learn how to enable the extension on your wiki, you can visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-Wiki.
View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
Developers with an account on Wikitech-wiki should check if any action is required for their accounts. The wiki is being changed to use the single-user-login (SUL) system, and other configuration changes. This change will help reduce the overall complexity for the weekly software updates across all our wikis.
In depth
The server switch was completed successfully last week with a read-only time of only 2 minutes 46 seconds. This periodic process makes sure that engineers can switch data centers and keep all of the wikis available for readers, even if there are major technical issues. It also gives engineers a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems that normally run 24 hours a day, and often helps to reveal weaknesses in the infrastructure. The process involves dozens of software services and hundreds of hardware servers, and requires multiple teams working together. Work over the past few years has reduced the time from 17 minutes down to 2–3 minutes. [3]
Meetings and events
October 4–6: WikiIndaba Conference's Hackathon in Johannesburg, South Africa
November 4–6: MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 in Vienna, Austria
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Example: search for "Simpsons" in my talk/archives
Copyright
Wikipedia editors are somehow expected to know a lot of stuff about this topic. I find it a bit overwhelming. I checked out ISBN 978-0199941162 from my local library, but confess it's been a struggle to put down my keyboard & mouse long enough to read it. Taking notes and posting links to terms as I come across them.
Done
Administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Guideline and policy news
Arbitration
Miscellaneous
done. Administrators can edit MediaWiki:Specialpages-summary.
