The English Wikipedia reached a milestone on Thursday this week when the 1,000^th featured article was promoted. The promoted article was Iranian peoples, an article pertaining to the ethnic groups in several regions, including the Middle East and Central Asia.

A press release was issued by the Wikimedia Foundation when the article was promoted; because the number of featured articles had been steadily increasing toward one thousand, this milestone was already anticipated beforehand, with some Wikipedians even joking about creating a million-FA pool, similar to the "million article pool". At the beginning of the week, there were 997 featured articles, and two more — Stuyvesant High School and Football (soccer) — were promoted on Wednesday, bringing the total number one short of the thousand mark.

The Iranian peoples article had been nominated last Friday, 2 June, by Tombseye, one of two primary contributors to the article. He commented that the article had been "written with some extensive referencing" and that it had "withstood and evolved with various disputes... now resolved." The other primary contributor to the article was Khoikhoi. The article received mostly positive comments during the FAC. "[It was a] very informative article," commented Eupator, "[that] scrutinizes every aspect of the topic." However, there were also several suggestions on improvements, most of which were acted upon.

Featured articles must pass strict criteria to ensure that they are "well written, comprehensive, factually accurate, neutral, and stable". Since the inception of the program in January 2004, the number of featured articles has steadily risen. Although several observers have noted that the standards for a featured article have also gone up over time, leading to an increased number of removed featured articles, the number has never decreased in a significant amount of time. Wikipedia reached 500 featured articles in February 2005 (see archived story), and featured article director Raul654 has commented that the number of featured articles increases at approximately one article promotion per day.