Today Wikimedia's world-wide five-minute-average transmission rate crossed 10gbit/sec for the first time ever, as far as I know. This peak rate was achieved while serving roughly 91,725 requests per second.

This fantastic news is almost coincident with Wikipedia's 9th anniversary on January 15th. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Day ]

In casual units, a rate of 10gbit/sec is roughly equivalent to 5 of the US Library of Congress per day (using the common 1 LoC = 20 TiB units). Wikimedia's 24 hour average transmission rate is now over 5.4gbit/sec, or 2.6 US LoC/day.

A snapshot of the traffic graph on this historic day can be seen here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2010-01-11_wikimedia_crosses_10gbit.p...

Ten years ago many traditional information sources were turning electronic, and possibly locking out the unlimited use previously enjoyed by public libraries. It seemed to me that closed pay-per-use electronic databases would soon dominate all other sources of factual information. At the same time, the public seemed to be losing much of its interest in the more intellectually active activities such as reading. So if someone told me then that within the decade one of the most popular websites in the world would be a free content encyclopedia, consisting primarily of text, or that the world would soon be consuming over 50 terabytes of compressed educational material per day—I never would have believed them.

The growth and success of the Wikimedia projects is an amazing accomplishment, both for the staff and volunteers keeping the infrastructure operating efficiently as well as the tens of thousands of volunteers contributing this amazing corpus. This success affirms the importance of intellectual endeavours in our daily lives and demonstrates the awesome power of people working together towards a common goal.

Congratulations to you all.