Wikipedia at Seven Million Articles
As Wikipedia celebrates another milestone, the differences between the early days and now have less to do with Wikipedia than with the internet around it.
When The Wikipedian returned from an extended hiatus in December 2023, the relaunch post previewed likely topics of the near future. Among them:
Wikipedia’s 7 millionth article should be written sometime in December 2024. What was Wikipedia like when its 1 millionth article was written? What is different now? What’s the same?
It ended up taking a bit longer than expected. The milestone finally arrived at the end of May 2025—nearly six months later than projected, and a little over a month ago at this writing. We’re only talking about it because of round number bias, but hey, seven million is a lot of anything, except maybe TikTok views.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
So which article had the honor of being Wikipedia’s seven millionth? Well, it’s complicated.
As the milestone came into view, the regulars geared up for a discussion about “which article did it”. Some gamesmanship was expected; one editor even shared their strategy for trying to score lucky number seven million. And then, like an eBay bid sniping, multiple articles were created in the same minute—2:26 UTC, or about 10:30 p.m. Eastern—making it difficult to declare a winner.
The community settled on Operators and Things, a 1958 memoir of schizophrenia, published under a pseudonym. The four runners-up were:
Why this one over the others? It’s a little hard to explain. Of course, it could be the one. But the choice is as much symbolic as it is technical. Wikipedians helping select which articles to spotlight want articles showing Wikipedia at its best.
Absent a clear winner, amid concerns that other plausible contenders were cobbled together from data sets, otherwise lacked human interest, or might forever remain a short “stub” article—like certain Minsk-area subdivisions or herbacious perennials I could name—Operators and Things wasn’t a reconfigured database entry, it wasn’t gamed, and wasn’t anyone’s least favorite.
But some participants in the process didn’t seem to understand, as it was somewhat indelicately explained, that it was “about picking the most ‘photogenic’ (so to speak) article that paints the project in the best light.” A disillusioned editor replied: “Now I see it is simply about PR”. A third demurred: “The article should be what it is. Not what we wish it was.”
In the moment, the book looked the most ready for primetime—although today I think you’d have to go with the flood article, which has more citations, more details, and better images.
I Can See for Milestones and Milestones
The one millionth article was Jordanhill railway station, a nondescript suburban train stop in Glasgow, created on March 1, 2006. To this day, the page contains a self-referential note about its milestone status, and that it “received international recognition” for the designation. Later milestone articles were spared the navel-gazing, but their creation was still sometimes considered newsworthy.
It took just over five years from Wikipedia’s launch for an article about the side-platformed railway station to become its millionth. Then momentum picked up, for a while. It took just 18 months to hit two million during Wikipedia’s exponential editor growth in the mid-aughts. Yet the pace slowed with each successive million, until the seven millionth took slightly longer than the first.
This chart tracks the number of days between milestones:
By the four-million mark, editors began creating commemorative pages for each milestone. But long before that, editors had a tradition of placing bets on not just the date of future milestones, but sometimes even which article it might be.
The pool for the eight millionth article closed in 2021, but users are still placing bets on the ninth, tenth, and even one-hundred-millionth articles. There’s a joke entry for an “infinity pool” but the quadrillion pool appears to be at least kind of serious.
What’s Changed About Wikipedia
Nineteen years have passed since Jordanhill’s fifteen minutes of fame—a whole generation. March 2006 was an exciting time to be part of Wikipedia. The site was less polished. Articles were shorter. Here is the Jordanhill Railway Station article at the end of its first day, and here it is in May 2025. Editors were more welcoming and less territorial—there was more to create than to defend.
Which doesn’t mean they weren’t concerned about optics.
The last of Wikipedia’s core policies had been adopted just three months earlier—Biographies of Living Persons (BLP)—following an embarrassing hoax. A few months later, the site would be roasted by The Onion with the headline “Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence”. Today, that kind of jokey vandalism is mostly a thing of the past, thanks to ClueBot NG, a vandalism-fighting bot that’s been on patrol since 2010.
But overall, Wikipedia itself hasn’t changed all that much. It’s still a freely-licensed, volunteer-driven project, maintained by a sprawling and sometimes contentious consensus-driven community, backed by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is even more trusted by Google in 2025—and now by ChatGPT as well. Even the front page of the site looks remarkably the same today as it did in 2006.
What’s Changed About the Internet
What’s really different from 2006 isn’t so much Wikipedia. It’s the rest of the internet, how we use it, and how we feel about that.
In 2006, the internet was still a place you went to get away from being IRL. The pre-commercial, late 1990s internet of Usenet and Geocities still felt recent, and the “Web 2.0” era of blogs and social media was still emerging.
When Wikipedia’s first millionth article was written, YouTube wasn’t owned by Google yet, and Facebook was still in MySpace’s shadow. Reddit was a newborn. Wikipedia, too, remained a scrappy, idealistic experiment. People were starting to take it seriously, but it wasn’t entirely to be trusted—pretty much the conventional wisdom around generative AI today.
Most of the collaborative and media-based websites in its age cohort haven’t fared so well. Many, like MetaFilter or Fark or Slashdot are actually still around, but the world has moved on. Wikipedia feels like a holdover from an earlier, better, more human version of the internet.
Recently, The Wikipedian pulled off the shelf a dusty old copy of Suck.com’s 1997 essay collection, Suck: Worst-Case Scenarios in Media, Culture, Advertising, and the Internet. Suck was a proto-blog—one new post daily, formatted in a tall, centered column that would look right at home on a smartphone today. Its pseudonymous writers eventually ended up at Salon, The New York Times, Wired. The essays were bracing, self-aware, discursive, and fun—time-wasters in the best sense.
But nobody writes like that online anymore.
“What happened is that the internet stopped being something you went to in order to separate from the real world,” Dan Nosowitz wrote for New York in 2018, when Wikipedia had just 5.6 million articles, “not the place you seek to waste time, but the place you go to so that you’ll someday have time to waste. … It is not very much fun.”
Wikipedia is one of the last places where a people-first collaborative project is as relevant as the algorithm-driven colossuses in its peer set today. It’s sometimes even fun.
Thanks a Million
In the roughly four weeks since passing the last milestone, Wikipedia has added more than 16,000 new articles. If current trends hold, Wikipedia will reach its eight millionth article as early as September 2031. It should take seven years to pass nine million—call it December 2038. And if the trend holds, Wikipedia’s 10 millionth article should arrive in March 2047, when Wikipedia will be not quite fifty, twenty two years from now.