As of June 30, 2008:

4th Most Popular Site on the entire internet, only 20 paid staff.

Number of  articles: 10.7 million across 250 languages.

Largest Wikipedias: English (2.4 million articles), German (765,000), French (675,000), Polish (515,000), Japanese (500,000).

Up and coming: The Indonesian Wikipedia has 85,000 articles; Vietnamese and Telugu have more than 40,000; Afrikaans has more than 10,000 articles, and the Swahili edition has 7,000.

More than 300 million page-views per month. 251 million unique visitors per month according to comScore, estimated to represent a reach of  29% of  the total Internet audience (June 2008 data).

By unique visitors in comparison to other websites:  #6 in Middle East/Africa; #6 in Asia/Pacific; #5 in Europe; #5 in Latin America; #8 in North America.

Approximately 100,000 active editors (coined users who made more than 5 changes in the last month). Wikipedia, from PDF earnings report.

Why vote for change?

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Twenty three universities have agreed to share and combine their digitized content, including millions of scanned books and documents, in one gigantic, 78-terabyte library that launched Monday.

Called the HathiTrust, the depository contains digital content from 11 University of California libraries and a 12-university consortium that forms the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which includes the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago.

Before the HathiTrust launched, digital content was isolated to each university library, according to John Wilkin, associate university librarian of the University of Michigan, who was named the executive director of HathiTrust. 

“This effort combines the expertise and resources of some of the nation’s foremost research libraries and holds even greater promise as it seeks to grow beyond the initial partners,” Wilkin said in a press release. Press Release [HathiTrust]  LINK to original story.

BookMooch is a community for exchanging used books.

BookMooch lets you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want.

Give & receive: Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you’ve read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish.

No cost: there is no cost to join or use this web site: your only cost is mailing your books to others.

Points for entering books: you receive a tenth-of-a-point for every book you type into our system, and one point each time you give a book away. In order to keep receiving books, you need to give away at least one book for every three you receive. [LINK]

Struggling with shrinking revenues and new federal mandates that focus on improving the test scores of the lowest-achieving pupils, Mountain Grove and many other school districts across the country have turned to cutting programs for their most promising students.

read more | digg story

Born and raised in Vancouver, Severn Suzuki has been working on environmental and social justice issues since kindergarten. At age 9, she and some friends started the Environmental Children’s Organization (ECO), a small group of children committed to learning and teaching other kids about environmental issues. They traveled to 1992’s UN Earth Summit, where 12 year-old Severn gave this powerful speech that deeply affected (and silenced) some of the most prominent world leaders. The speech had such an impact that she has become a frequent invitee to many U.N. conferences. [LINK]

“I would say that the likelihood of military action against Iran is 100 percent.” - Neoconservative Frank Gaffney.

There have been between50,000 and 500,000 war-related deaths in Iraq since we invaded. The cost of the Iraq war will soon reach a trillion dollars.

“Could we have managed [the threat of Saddam Hussein]by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have.” Neoconservative Richard Perle.

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Gen Y is taking over. The generation of young adults that’s composed of the children of Boomers, Generation Jones, and even some Gen X’ers, is the biggest generation since the Baby Boomers and three times the size of Gen X. As the Boomers fade into retirement and Gen Y takes root in the workplace, we’re going to see some big changes ahead, not just at work, but on the web as a whole. There’s some contention over where exactly Gen Y starts and stops - some say those born 1983-1997, others think 1982-1997. In this week’s Entertainment Weekly, Gen Y is defined as “current 13 to 31 year-olds” and BusinessWeek says they can be as young as five. Regardless, we know who they are - they’re the young kids of today, the most digitally active generation yet, having been born plugged in. more at ReadWriteWeb

In my opinion we already see this happening with a certain political campaign. The one and only with plans for technology for a trully open government.�

Taj Chahal has thrown himself some great birthday bashes. He has rented limos to take his friends to San Francisco. He’s flown to Vegas. This year, for his 29th birthday, Chahal decided to do something a bit different: He hosted a surprise party for 300 total strangers - complete with birthday cake and party favors for everyone - at Martha’s Kitchen, a San Jose charity that serves meals to the homeless and working poor.

Most of us consider our birthdays as a time to receive, not to give. So why would this guy celebrate his by feeding the homeless?

It’s all about karma, he says.

“If you are blessed to have the things that you have, then you should share them with others.”
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“And I was wounded,” he whispered dramatically. “My dad had ruined my normal!”

The crowd murmured affirmatively, apparently knowing what it was to have a crushed normal.

After introducing us to the concept of wounds and normals, Fortenberry told us one last cautionary tale before sending us to our first group session. It was about a paratrooper who had done a tandem jump with a training dummy for some Army exercise or other, only to have the dummy’s chute fail to open. The dummy had plunged to the ground, crashing through the trees and landing with a thud in a bush. Fortenberry’s Army buddy had taken advantage of the situation to have a little joke at the expense of some other exercising soldiers on the ground who weren’t privy to the fact that the troopers were jumping with dummies. The Army buddy had cried and wailed in asking where the “body” had fallen, leaving the soldiers on the ground to think that someone had just been killed. (Read more…)

Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics gathers 84,000 prices in about 200 categories to form the Consumer Price Index, one measure of inflation. It’s among the statistics that the Federal Reserve considered when it cut interest rates on Wednesday. The categories are weighted according to an estimate of what the average American spends.

[Link]

Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation’s educational decline, but it probably doesn’t matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up. (Read more…)