维基百科:新闻稿/十万条目/en
Chinese Wikipedia Publishes Its 100,000th Article
12 November 2006
The Chinese Wikipedia community announced today the creation of its 100,000th article, "Pedder Street Clock Tower" (畢打街鐘樓), in the Chinese language edition of Wikipedia. The Chinese edition of Wikipedia has now become the 12th Wikipedia to reach the 100,000-article milestone, and the second Wikipedia in an Asian language to do so, after Japanese.
Other editions of Wikipedia that have already reached this milestone are, in order of current number of articles, English, German, French, Polish, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Swedish, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian. One of the goals of Wikipedia's establishment was to have all language editions exceed 100,000 articles. English Wikipedia reached this goal first on 22 January 2003, whilst Chinese Wikipedia attained this some four years later.
Wikipedia is the largest and the most widely known project of international non-profit-making organization Wikimedia Foundation. Its mission is "to provide everyone on earth with a free encyclopedia, written in his or her own language, containing the sum of all human knowledge." Wikipedia allows anyone to freely edit the content of its articles, with all contributions distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia now has more than 250 language editions, with a total of more than 5.5 million articles.
The Chinese edition of Wikipedia was founded in October 2002, and now has more than 120,000 users from around the world, collaborating in article creation and improvement. Although public awareness and popularity of Chinese Wikipedia remain low in the Chinese speaking community around the world, compared to other editions such as the English and German Wikipedias, users from around the world continue to cooperate in writing and editing articles. At present, Chinese Wikipedia is growing by approximately 200 articles everyday.
One of the features of Chinese Wikipedia is its implementation of an internal conversion system for Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters, facilitating users regardless of what script the article itself is written in. The system even handles differences in vocabulary among territories that use the respective scripts. As the system caters for Chinese readers without the need to separate the Simplified and Traditional versions, the Chinese Wikipedia has been able to grow at a considerable pace. However, the growth of Chinese Wikipedia has not been without problems. Wikipedia has been blocked in Mainland China by the government on several occasions as part of its internet censorship policy, preventing users there from accessing Wikipedia via normal means, and hindering the editing of articles and participation by users in the territory.
As the Chinese Wikipedia community continues to grow, various Wikipedia-related events have been held by the Internet-based community, including the first Chinese Wikimedia Conference held in Hong Kong in August 2006. A team from Taipei, Taiwan has also been chosen to host the third International Wikimania Conference, facilitating an international exchange between contributors from various editions of Wikimedia projects. Wikimania 2007 will be held from 3 to 5 August 2007 in Taipei, with previous Wikimanias held in Frankfurt, Germany (2005) and Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (2006).
In the future, Chinese Wikipedia will not only increase the number of its articles, but also improve their quality. In response to the popularity of Question-&-Answer websites, the Chinese Wikipedia has launched a section called "Reference Desk" recently, hoping to attract the users of those websites to Wikipedia.