I've got proof.

Along the lines of "more luck than brains" I can claim that I'm lucky that I save things. In a lecture of mine that examines various aspects of hypertext on the web I discuss the Wikipedia. For that lecture I saved a copy of the front page of the Wikipedia, and that page happens to have the date of that particular visit. Thus we learn from the main page from May 13, 2002:

We started in January 2001 and already have about 29,806 articles.

With that in mind, we can get a picture of its growth since then. At the end of February, 2004 the main page of the Wikipedia tell us that they:

are now working on 214927 articles in the English version.

and that they have more than 500,000 articles in 50 languages. That's pretty impressive growth.

Go to: Too Common Knowledge.