After fifteen years of providing 11th-hour copy+paste material for high schoolers, the English-language version of Wikipedia has just hit a milestone: five million articles.
The article that pushed the site over the edge was this entry on persoonia terminalis, a shrub native to eastern Australia (at least, according to Wikipedia). It was written by Cas Liber, an Australian volunteer with 1,500 articles to his name.
In a statement on the milestone, the Wikipedia communityreminded everyone that there’s a long way to go: by their calculations, 100 million articles will be needed to cover the sum of all human knowledge. Even then, many of the five million existing articles are badly-edited and inaccurate, and it will take time (and a lot more edits) to bring them up to scratch.
