From the Wikimedia Foundation
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English Wikipedia Publishes Millionth Article
ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES, March 1, 2006
The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the 1,000,000th article in the English language edition of Wikipedia. The article is about the Jordanhill railway station in Scotland, and it was started by Wikipedia contributor Ewan MacDonald, whose username is Nach0king. Wikipedia is a free, multilingual, online encyclopedia with 3.3 million articles under development in more than 125 languages.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales commented, "We are thrilled that our millionth article in English is about the Jordanhill railway station. This is not something which would appear in a traditional encyclopedia, and it shows how Wikipedia reflects the needs and interests of people everywhere, and not just the dictates of what academics and cultural mavens claim is worthy of an encyclopedia."
The full text of the English Wikipedia is located at en.wikipedia.org. In addition to articles, the English Wikipedia offers dozens of graphical timelines and subject-specific portals. Its media repository includes four hundred thousand images and hundreds of full-length songs, videos, and animations, many of which are available for free distribution.
Although its method of editing is new and controversial, Wikipedia has already won acclaim and awards for its detailed coverage of current events, popular culture, and scientific topics; its usability; and its international community of contributors. BBC News has called Wikipedia "One of the most reliably useful sources of information around, on or off-line." Daniel Pink, author and WIRED Magazine columnist, has described Wikipedia as "the self-organizing, self-repairing, hyperaddictive library of the future," and Tim Berners-Lee, father of the Web, has called it "The Font of All Knowledge."
Wikipedia is among the world's most popular websites, receiving tens of millions of visitors every day. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, and has spawned sister projects, including a dictionary, a library of textbooks, a compendium of quotations, a news site, and a media repository. These projects are all run using the open source MediaWiki software.
Other articles created literally seconds later include an overview of the Tennessee Commissioner of Financial Institutions, biography of professional baseball player Aaron Ledesma, and a look at cellular architecture. In all, over one hundred articles were contributed in the same second as Jordanhill railway station, as many editors waited anxiously for the opportunity to post the millionth article.
In response to the landmark in the English Wikipedia's history, brief translations had been included in Wikipedia's Alemannisch German, Arabic, Chinese, Danish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai and Welsh versions.
The original goal for Wikipedia was to create 100,000 articles. This number was reached on 23 January 2003.
About Wikipedia
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. -- Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation
Started in January 2001, Wikipedia is the world's most current, fastest-growing, and largest encyclopedia. It is created entirely by volunteers who contribute, update, and revise articles in a collaborative process. The English language edition contains 20 million internal links, and incorporates 65,000 edits and 1,700 new articles each day.
Wikipedia's content is written for a general audience, and is continually revised for clarity, readability, and accuracy. Original text, images and sounds contributed to Wikipedia are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL), which lets users copy and modify each other's work based on a principle known as "copyleft." The entire database can be freely downloaded in full.
Though the project faced criticism in 2005 for factual inaccuracies in some articles, the science journal Nature published a study in December which found Wikipedia's science content to have only slightly more errors per article than that of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Other, less formal external peer reviews have been generally positive.
About Wikimedia
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 25 most visited websites. Wikipedia and Wikimedia's awards include the Webby Award, the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, the Japan Advertisers Association's Web Creation Award, and the World Technology Award in Communications Technology.
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.
Further information
Contact
For questions and interviews, please email press@wikimedia.org , or (in English only) contact directly:
Jimmy Wales, Chair, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation
Phone: +1-310-474-3223
Email: jwales@wikia.com
Angela Beesley, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation
Phone: (+44)-208-816-7308
Email: abeesley@wikimedia.org
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Wikipedia Logo
Today, at 23:09 UTC,  the internet encyclopedia Wikipedia reached the point of having over one million articles written in English. In comparison, the largest  traditional English-language encyclopedia, ''Encyclopædia Britannica'', has 120,000 articles. This milestone marks an important point in Wikipedia's short history.

There was minor confusion over the millionth article; it was first held to be Jordanhill Railway Station, then a brief biography of baseball player Aaron Ledesma.  The millionth article was later confirmed to be the former, started by Wikipedia contributor Nach0king (Ewan Macdonald).  "While I am, of course, delighted at being the one to hit this milestone, I must confess, along with many others I timed my contributions tonight to give me a chance at being the lucky one," he wrote on his Wikipedia user page.

Jimmy Wales commented that "We are thrilled that our millionth article in English is about the Jordanhill railway station.  This is not something which would appear in a traditional encyclopedia, and it shows how Wikipedia reflects the needs and interests of people everywhere, and not just the dictates of what academics and cultural mavens claim is worthy of an encyclopedia."

=== Celebrations ===
The milestone was celebrated by a party on the Freenode IRC network, where Wikimedia's official IRC channels can be found.  The milestone was preceded by an announcement to all 30,000 Freenode users, that a separate channel,  #wikipedia-countdown, was being set aside for a celebration.  In that channel, an IRC script, ran by Wikipedian ems, called off the article numbers as they passed by.  A total of 733 different people joined the channel over the course of the afternoon.  The tension was high when the millionth article was reached; in the first 40 seconds afterwards, chatting was briefly enabled in the channel, and over 3,000 lines of celebratory chat filled the room; chatting had to be disabled until everyone had calmed down.

=== About Wikipedia ===
Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales, the CEO and co-founder of Bomis, Inc., and Larry Sanger, an employee of Bomis. Wikipedia began as a complementary project to Nupedia, which was created by Wales to be a free internet encyclopedia. Nupedia was open like Wikipedia but had a much more complex editing system. One day, Sanger made a proposal on the Nupedia mailing list exploring the possibility of a Wiki-based encyclopedia. Out of this proposal, Wikipedia was born. Sanger was appointed editor-in-chief of Wikipedia by Wales, and the project was underwritten by Bomis.  Nupedia was eventually scrapped.

Wikipedia has grown immensely in five short years and is no longer under the control of Bomis. The success of Wikipedia and some of the earlier sister projects lead Wales to create a non-profit organization to run them, called the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia has a user base of around one million registered users and contains over three million pages altogether. It has become one of the world's top 25 websites, as ranked by Alexa Internet, and has come to the attention of the media worldwide.

A source of negative publicity for Wikipedia in November 2005 was the John Seigenthaler Sr.  controversy, in which a then-unknown vandal created a biographical article about Seigenthaler on Wikipedia that contained numerous false and defamatory statements. This article went unnoticed for several months until it was discovered by Victor S. Johnson, Jr., a friend of Seigenthaler's, who brought it to his attention. Another friend corrected the erroneous information. Seigenthaler contacted Wales about the problem and later wrote an op-ed column for ''USA Today'' about the incident, which led to much unfavorable coverage of Wikipedia. However Wikipedia also experienced some of its strongest growth in usage shortly after his op-ed.

In December 2005, a more positive story about Wikipedia appeared in Nature magazine, describing a study that reported Wikipedia's science articles to be slightly less accurate as those in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 

Since many Wikipedia pages are not articles, the number of articles in Wikipedia depends on how an article is defined. To be counted as an article, a Wikipedia page must be in the article namespace and contain at least one internal link. This definition will include some stub articles. The number of articles would be about 8% smaller under the alternative definition that an article must also contain at least 200 characters of text.

The next largest Wikipedia is the German version, which contains over 350,000 articles. Currently there are Wikipedias in 125 different languages, containing 3.3 million articles in total.