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English Wikipedia Announces Thousandth Featured Article
ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES, June 8, 2006
The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the 1000th featured article on the English Wikipedia. Featured articles are the best articles on Wikipedia, and are required to be comprehensive, factually accurate, and written from a neutral point of view.
The 1000th featured article was Iranian peoples, an article about the Iranic inhabitants of the Middle East and Central Asia. The article was written over the course of eighteen months, through the collaboration of dozens of editors, many of them anonymous. The article's two most prolific editors are Tombseye, a graduate student studying political science in New York, and Khoikhoi, an undergraduate from California.
The article was nominated as a Featured article candidate and peer reviewed to make sure it met Wikipedia's strict criteria, during which suggestions where made to improve the article, before it was nearly-unanimously approved as a featured article.
Wikipedia has featured articles on a wide range of topics, from the obscure, like exploding whales or toilets in Japan, to the well known and contentious, such as Global warming and the Yom Kippur War. A different featured article is chosen each day to appear on the Wikipedia Main Page. Over Wikipedia's lifespan, Featured article standards have risen significantly. Older featured articles that no longer meet the current standards are regularly delisted, but despite this, the overall number of featured articles has risen consistently since the process began.
Similar processes exist in the versions of Wikipedia in many other languages, which have selected, for example, nearly 800 Exzellente Artikel in German, over 280 Articles de qualité in French, and over 180 Artículos destacados in Spanish. Wikipedia's featured articles are complemented by over 100 featured lists and over 500 featured pictures.
Wikipedia's featured content, together with articles chosen by other means, are expected to form the core of articles chosen for publication in Wikipedia 1.0, a proposed release of a set of Wikipedia's best articles. The SOS Children's Villages charity recently released a CD containing thousands of articles, many of them featured articles.
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an international non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the 20 most visited websites. The Wikimedia Foundation was created in 2003 to manage the operation of existing projects, and is based in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA. Wikimedia has local chapters in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Serbia and Montenegro, and Poland. Chapters in Canada, India, China, Australia and the Netherlands are among those currently in development.
Most of the Foundation's operations are funded by reader and contributor donations, usually of USD$50 or less. Its 2005 budget was USD$739,200, and based on traffic growth, the 2006 budget is expected to be significantly higher.
For questions and interviews, please email email@example.com, or (in English only) contact directly:
Mark Pellegrini, English Wikipedia Featured Article director
Email: Mapellegrini (at) comcast.net
Persian local woman.jpg
An Iranian model displaying traditional attire.
Image credit: "Courtesy bodazey.com)