The Signpost

News and notes

English Wikipedia reaches five million articles

Related articles
Previous milestones

WMF enacts reforms at Wikimania; main page redesign; 4 millionth article milestone
16 July 2012

Three million articles, Chen, Walsh and Klein win board election, and more
17 August 2009

News and notes: 2,000,000, Finnish ArbCom, statistics, milestones
10 September 2007

English Wikipedia hits one million articles
6 March 2006

The English Wikipedia reached five million articles on November 1 with the article Persoonia terminalis, a shrub native to eastern Australia. The article was created by Cas Liber, an Australian Wikipedian who has been editing since 2006. He has created and edited a number of Featured Articles on similar topics and is active in projects like WikiProject Fungi and WikiProject Plants. Liber was one of a number of editors submitting articles around the same time to try to hit the milestone. He wrote "I tried to pick articles I could get to FA status at some point...to show the world that we could FAC the 5000000th." No free image of Persoonia terminalis is currently available, but a number of Wikipedians have independently contacted an Australian photographer who posted copyrighted images of the shrub's two subspecies to Flickr.

The event has been marked by a Wikimedia blog post and a letter from the community, which is reproduced here.

Previous milestones Date Article
1 million 1 March 2006 Jordanhill railway station
2 million 9 September 2007 El Hormiguero
3 million 17 August 2009 Beate Eriksen
4 million 13 July 2012 Ezbet el-Borg


+ Add a comment

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

It's remarkable you managed to squeeze in mention of the 5,000,000 millionth article into this issue, especially considering that it only occurred an hour or two before publication time. Bravo! Liz Read! Talk! 18:40, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. I spent a lot of time anxiously watching the countdown this weekend. Gamaliel (talk) 19:53, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]


Images now available

As a result of the initiative mentioned here, images of Persoonia terminalis' two subspecies are now available on Commons.

Thanks to the photographer, Russell Cumming, for kindly relicensing his images. Andreas JN466 12:33, 3 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]



       

The Signpost · written by many · served by Sinepost V0.9 · 🄯 CC-BY-SA 4.0