No, the last milestone-related press release was the Commons reaching 100,000 uploads, which, despite not being sent out to many places (<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Press_releases/100K/log-en>), did see some press coverage, mostly in Germany (<http://news.google.com/news?hl=de&q=wikimedia>) Also, as Przykuta notes, the milestone will be shortly before Wikimania, so the release need not focus only on the milestone, but include details of the conference, since we should know by then who most of the speakers are, meaning we will have something other than a new milestone to announce. Angela.

Przykuta: Wikimania should get a dedicated press release when we have finalized the programme. We can mention the "2 million articles" number in that, but it shouldn't be the focus. It seems unlikely that anyone who would not care about Wikimania itself would care about yet another Wikipedia milestone. The next Wikipedia-specific press release, in my opinion, should be about peer review, perhaps when we put the validation tool in operation. Best, Erik

Nod Przykuta is absolutely right. Big milestones do not have much effects on very large languages right now, but they are a rare opportunity for other languages with still little media attention. I would also remind that we should (could) very possibly have a new fundraising drive soon... and it might be a good idea to reflect in which order to do the three events * fundraising * 2M * wikimania Ant Przykuta a écrit:

Erik Moeller (erik_moeller(a)gmx.de) [050601 00:20]: Eeek! Please let article rating run experimentally for a while! We can wait on telling the world when we're actually getting useful results from it ... - d.

Erik Moeller (erik_moeller(a)gmx.de) [050601 06:27]: I'd rather wait until we're at least past the experimental phase. But perhaps I'm being overly cautious ... others' opinions? (It'd certainly give the feature one hell of a beta test ;-) - d.

Nod But *this* announcement would not be a global one. Launching article quality survey is of great interest for the english wikipedia due to its size. It is of much reduced interest for smaller language (as the lack of interest in validation topics by minor languages show in meta). Wikipedias are at different stages of development. 2M global article can help smaller languages get a press announcement. I am not sure they would dare send a "quality survey" if their project is 11 254 articles. Journalists are more likely to have a great laugh :-) Ant Erik Moeller a écrit:

Anthere (anthere9(a)yahoo.com) [050601 14:24]: Mmm. It's of great interest on en: and (I think) de: (particularly in regards to their quality campaign). Has anyone on fr: noticed? - d.

Jimmy Wales: Perhaps it makes sense to distinguish different types of media. Heise.de, Slashdot.org, Kuro5hin.org, CNET and other media outlets who have in the past frequently reported about Wikimedia events are different from, say, the New York Times or USA Today. Kuro5hin and heise.de both reported about the 100K Commons uploads. However, in both cases, there were many reader comments of the type "Yet Another Wikimedia Number" (YAWN). I think that for a "2 million articles" press release, the reaction might be similar, especially because Wikimedia Commons is a new project most people haven't heard of, while all of these outlets have repeatedly reported about Wikipedia itself. On the other hand, I expect that all of them might find Wikimania interesting. More simply put, if you're a geek, you don't need to hear this number, so geeky news sources might be less inclined to report it. A traditional newspaper like the NYT, however, might see a major milestone like this as a good opportunity to report about Wikipedia again (and hence Wikimania). The only problem I see with these mega-milestones is that the numbers are just getting too large. :-) When you say "The German edition of Wikipedia has surpassed Brockhaus" or "The English edition has surpassed Britannica", you give people a perspective. When you say "All editions together have surpassed 2 million articles", it's not a number people can do anything with, or imagine the significance of. In fact, for many people who have never used WP, the immediate reaction will be an incredulous "But how many of them are any good?" That is to say, I think that when a Wikipedia language has surpassed all existing encyclopedias in quantity, the focus of our media work should shift to quality: number of reviewed articles, results of quality comparisons, and so on. As for the combined press release at 2M, as noted above, I believe that using different media strategies for different outlets might be a good idea: focus on the major milestone for the traditional ones and on the exciting conference for the techy/geeky ones. Best, Erik