Wikipedia (English), the popular web portal that is home to information on just about anything on the face of the earth and beyond has registered a new milestone: it’s 5 millionth article went live on Sunday, November 1st 2015.
An article on an Eastern Australian shrub, Persoonia terminalis, published by Australian editor Cas Liber was the lucky one.
Wikipedia, launched in January 2001, has grown steadily from having just two million articles in 2007 to 3 million 2 years later and 4 million 3 years after that.
Wikipedia, estimated to hold close to 30 terabytes of data, is managed by Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization and it has consistently been one of the most visited websites in almost every country in the world. The crowd-sourced encyclopedia faces several challenges including the addition of inaccurate bits of information. With quite a high number of people dependent on Wikipedia for information, this has far-reaching consequences. Even then, the task at hand for the world’s largest encyclopedia is to get even more articles (currently estimated at 100 million) that cover more of the human knowledge base.
