Happy Birthday Wikipedia from TodaysPodcast.com

Happy Birthday Wikipedia. January 15th marks the beginning of Wikipedia's fifth year. The earliest encyclopedias took decades to produce and didn't reflect current events or debates. In five years Wikipedia had hit these milestones.

• Just over one terabyte of data in over 1.2 million articles, 450,000 in English.
• Over 145 million words. Encyclopedia Britannica claims 120,000 articles with 55 million words.
• In October 2004 Wikipedia served up over 13 million page request per day.
• As I speak the servers are handling over 1000 requests per second.
• There have been 36,377 contributors to Wikipedia. Are you one of them? Should you be?

It is difficult to imagine what the next five years will produce.

The name Wikipedia is the combination of two terms wiki and encyclopedia.

The term encyclopedia comes from the Greek words enkyklios paideia meaning a circle of instruction or education. In Latin the Greek words were combined into one word encyclopaedia and that was used to describe a general education course.

Today the word refers to large general reference work. The modern encyclopedia format dates to 1704 and its establishment is credited to John Harris, editor of the Lexicon Technicum, or the Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences.

The word wiki is a neologism that doesn't appear in many, if any, printed dictionaries but I am sure it will. It was coined by Ward Cunningham in 1995 to describe web server software that allows users to create and edit a web page through a web browser. In Ward's words a wiki is "The simplest online database that could possibly work." The first wiki was the Portland Pattern Repository, a repository of computer programing patterns.

The term wiki was borrowed from the hawaiian wiki wiki which means quick.