On March 27, 2008, a few minutes after midnight GMT, Wikimedia announced that 10 million articles across all language editions of Wikipedia had been created. This announcement made a media splash, while another significant milestone a few days later, that 100 Wikipedias now have at least 5,000 articles, slipped by without fanfare. Wikipedia watchers won't be surprised at the details. Article number 10,000,000 was on the Hungarian Wikipedia and about Nicholas Hilliard, a painter of miniatures during the reign of Elizabeth I. The 100th language to reach 5,000 articles was Kapampangan, a major language in the Philippines. According to the Wikipedia Signpost from April 7, 2008, 40 percent of new articles are now coming from languages outside the top 10 (by size) language editions of Wikipedia—the leading group including most of the languages dominating global communications (though not Arabic). Wikipedia as a global project, encompassing both the topics and the languages of the world, has become a reality.
Scope exists for another book—or many books—on different models for user-contributed content: Other models are gaining prominence on the Web. A fitting place to end is with the thought that Wikipedia's model, which has become Wikimedia's model, may be one of the hardest to make work. Wikipedia took from earlier wikis the post-moderation concept: Allow people to contribute freely and deal with problematic content later. That this approach could succeed at all is counterintuitive, and even more debatable is whether the approach is feasible as a way to produce quality reference material. But surprisingly to many, Wikipedia has succeeded beyond anyone's hopes, perhaps leading to the truth of the oft-repeated saying that Wikipedia only works in practice, not in theory.[36]
We have written at length about the technical and social means that make this collaboration possible, that underpin the work on the Wikimedia projects, and how you can easily be a part of it all. We hope we have also made clear that technology is not in itself enough to build an editing community. Community is an essential part of Wikipedia's jargon. For each of the hundreds of new Wikimedia Foundation projects, the first and most important milestone is the day an editing community assembles to collaborate on a new reference project.
[36] See, for instance, the user essay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CatherineMunro/Why_am_I_here%3F.