4/7/2014

English Wikipedia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

English Wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Founded on 15 January 2001 and reaching four million articles by July 2012, it was the first edition of Wikipedia and remains the largest, with almost three times as many articles as the next largest, the Dutch Wikipedia. As of April 2014, nearly 14.4% of articles in all Wikipedias belong to the English-language edition. This share has gradually declined from more than 50% in 2003, due to the growth of Wikipedias in other languages.[2] There are 4,487,408 articles on the site (live count).[3] In December 2012, the combined text of the English Wikipedia's articles totaled approximately 9.7 gigabytes.[4] The Simple English Wikipedia is a variation, with most of the articles using a simplified level of English vocabulary. There are also two other "English" Wikipedias, the Scots Wikipedia (Scots Wikipaedia) which aims to preserve the vocabulary and grammar of the Scots language in all its forms over the past nine centuries, and the Old English (nglisc/Anglo-Saxon) Wikipedia.

English Wikipedia

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Contents
1 Pioneering edition 2 Users and editors 2.1 Arbitration Committee 3 Varieties of English 4 Controversies 5 Internal quality control and assessment of importance 6 Graphics 7 See also 8 References 9 Notes 10 External links

Pioneering edition
The English Wikipedia was the first Wikipedia edition and has remained the largest. It has pioneered many ideas as conventions, policies or features which were later adopted by some of the other-language Wikipedia editions. These ideas include "featured articles",[5] the neutral-point-of-view policy,[6] navigation templates,[7] the sorting of short "stub" articles into sub-categories,[8] dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration,[9] and weekly collaborations.[10] The English Wikipedia has adopted features from the German Wikipedia, and from smaller editions. These features include verified revisions from the German Wikipedia (dewiki), and town population-lookup templates from the Dutch Wikipedia (nlwiki). Although the English Wikipedia stores images and audio files, as well as text files, many of the images have been moved to Wikimedia Commons with the same name, as passed-through files. However, the English Wikipedia also has fair-use images and audio/video files (with copyright restrictions), most of which are not allowed on Commons. Many of the most active participants in the Wikimedia Foundation, and the developers of the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia, are English Wikipedia users.
The homepage of the English Wikipedia.

Web address Slogan

en.wikipedia.org

The Free Encyclopedia

Commercial? No Type of site Internet encyclopedia project

Users and editors

English Wikipedia statistics Number of user accounts Number of articles Number of files Number of administrators 21,091,105 4,487,408 828,105 1,416

Registration Optional (but required to create articles) Users Content license 21,091,105 Creative Commons Attribution/ Share-Alike 3.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL) Media licensing varies Wikimedia Foundation Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[1] 15 January 2001

The English Wikipedia reached 4,000,000 registered user accounts on 1 April 2007,[11] just a little over a year since it had crossed a threshold of 1,000,000 registered user accounts in late February 2006.[12] every month.[citation needed]

Owner Created by

About 250,000 new accounts are created Over 800,000 editors have edited Wikipedia more than 10 times.[13] Approximately the same number, 300,000 editors, edit Wikipedia every month; of these, Launched over 30,000 perform more than 5 edits per month, and a little over 3,000 perform more than 100 edits per month.[14] By 24 November 2011, a total of 500 million edits had been performed on the English Wikipedia.[citation needed] A 2008 survey provided some basic information on the demographics and motivations of Wikipedia editors.[15]

As the largest Wikipedia edition, and because English is such a widely used language, the English Wikipedia draws many users and editors whose native language is not English. Such users may seek information from the English Wikipedia rather than the Wikipedia of their native language because the English Wikipedia tends to contain more information about general subjects. Successful collaborations have developed between non-native English speakers who add content to the English Wikipedia and native English speakers who act as copyeditors for them.
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