Wikipedia
- Note: the name "Wikipedia" is often confused with several other, similar, names; please see the glossary for an explanation of these.
Wikipedia is a project dedicated to the building of free encyclopedias in all languages of the world.
The project started with the English-language Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. On March 23, 2001 it was joined by a French Wikipedia, and shortly afterwards by many other languages. Large efforts are underway to highlight the international nature of the project.
On 20 September 2004 Wikipedia reached a total of 1,000,000 articles in over 100 languages.
On 1 March 2006, the English Wikipedia hit 1,000,000 articles. On 9 September 2007, the English Wikipedia hit 2,000,000 articles. On 17 August 2009, the English Wikipedia hit 3,000,000 articles. On 13 July 2012, the English Wikipedia hit 4,000,000 articles. On 1 November 2015, the English Wikipedia hit 5,000,000 articles.
As of December 2016, there are 285 Wikipedias which have more than 100 articles, 135 of which have over 10,000 articles, and 58 of which have over 100,000 articles.
Following the English language Wikipedia, the German (27 December 2009), French (21 September 2010), Dutch (17 December 2011), Italian (22 January 2013), Russian (11 May 2013), Spanish (16 May 2013), Swedish (15 June 2013), Polish (24 September 2013), Waray (8 June 2014), Vietnamese (15 June 2014), Cebuano (16 July 2014) and Japanese editions (19 January 2016) have more than 1,000,000 articles.
On 5 September 2015, the Swedish Wikipedia hit 2,000,000 articles followed by the Cebuano Wikipedia on 14 February 2016 and by the German Wikipedia on 19 November 2016..
On 27 April 2016, the Swedish Wikipedia hit 3,000,000 articles followed by the Cebuano Wikipedia on 25 September 2016.
On 11 February 2017, the Cebuano Wikipedia hit 4,000,000 articles.
As of March 2017, there are 295 language editions of Wikipedia, which collectively have more than 44 million articles.
For detailed statistics, see the List of Wikipedias.
In 2004 Wikipedia won the Webby Award for "Community" and the Prix Ars Electronica for "Digital Community". In 2015, the Erasmus Prize was awarded to the Wikipedia community collectively.
Language versions
Texts about Wikipedia
- Wikipedia - by Mark Jeays, 2002 – an article for the The Canadian Writer's Guide (13th Edition)
- Wikipedia (Everything2) – an Everything2 node by Axel Boldt
See also
- Wikipedia
- List of Wikipedias
- List of largest wikis
- Wikimedia Foundation
- Wikimedia projects
- w:Wikipedia:Multilingual statistics
- Wikimedians
- Hardware maintenance and software development: MediaWiki development
- Wikimedia principles
