Re: [Wikimedia ZA] English Wikipedia: Five Million Articles

Hello everyone, Below is a short blurb I have written and put on the Wikimedia ZA website about the five millionth article on Wikipedia that was created today. I want to share it with all of you before I share it with the media tomorrow morning. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments (or improvements) about it. There are links to the sources where I got the figures mentioned in the statement on the version on the Wikimedia ZA website <http://wikimedia.org.za/wiki/Main_Page>. As you will be able to tell a large focus of the statement is to call for more South Africans to get involved in editing Wikipedia. Apologies for the short notice on this, I only saw the message about the 5 millionth article creation a few hours ago. --- *English Wikipedia: five million articles* Today, 1 November 2015, the 5 millionth article was created on English language Wikipedia about Persoonia terminalis -an Australian shrub- by long time Wikipedia editor Cas Liber. For more information about this momentous event in the Wikipedia community see the press statement by the Wikimedia Foundation at the link here. The 5,000,000 articles on English language Wikipedia would not have been possible without the 126,672 active editors and 1,329 administrators who have collectively made over 790,000,000 edits on the wiki. Currently Wikipedia is the 7th most popular website on the internet with only Google, Facebook, YouTube, Baidu (a Chinese search engine), Yahoo, and Amazon beating the online encyclopaedia in the rankings. According to Wiki Project South Africa there are just over 20,000 articles on English language Wikipedia about the country. Afrikaans language Wikipedia currently has 37,534 articles with 163 active editors and 11 administrators. Other South African language Wikipedia's are much smaller and in great need of an active editing community with languages such as North Sotho (2,687 articles), Sesotho (292 articles), Zulu (696 articles), Xhosa (417 articles), Venda (186 articles), and Tsonga (281 articles) having a Wikipedia in their respective languages. We would like to encourage all South Africans to contribute more to Wikipedia by editing articles, especially if they are in one of the less active language Wikipedias or about South African content or African content generally. There is a need for more editors from South Africa to help add content to Wikipedia. Best regards, Douglas. -- Douglas Ian Scott 司道格 Skype: douglas0scott South African mobile number: +27 (0)79 515 8727 _______________________________________________ WikimediaZA mailing list WikimediaZA(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaza