Wikipedia is a free multilingual open-source wiki-based online encyclopedia edited and maintained by a community of volunteer editors, started on 15 January 2001 as an English-language encyclopedia. Non-English editions were soon created: the German and Catalan editions were created on circa 16 March,[1] the French edition was created on 23 March,[2] and the Swedish edition was created on 23 May.[3] As of September 2024, Wikipedia articles have been created in 345 editions, with 332 currently active and 13 closed.[4]
The Meta-Wiki language committee manages policies on creating new Wikimedia projects. To be eligible, a language must have a valid ISO 639 code, be "sufficiently unique", and have a "sufficient number of fluent users".[5]
Wikipedia projects vary in how they divide dialects and variants. For example, the English Wikipedia includes most modern varieties of English including American English and British English.[6][7] Similarly, the Spanish Wikipedia includes both Peninsular Spanish and Latin American Spanish,[8] and the Portuguese Wikipedia includes both European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese.[9] In contrast, some languages have multiple Wikipedias. For example, Serbo-Croatian encompasses four Wikipedia editions, Serbo-Croatian and three different standardized varieties (Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian).[10]
Additionally, some Wikipedia projects apply different approaches to orthography. For instance, the Chinese Wikipedia automatically transliterates between six standard forms: three using simplified Chinese characters (Mainland China, Malaysia, and Singapore) and three using traditional Chinese characters (Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau).[11][12] And rather than relying on transliteration, Belarusian has separate Wikipedia projects for the official Narkamaŭka and Taraškievica orthographies.[13]
Each Wikipedia project has a code, which is used as a subdomain of wikipedia.org. The codes mostly conform to ISO 639-1 two-letter codes or ISO 639-3 three-letter codes, with preference given to a two-letter code if available.[14] For example, en stands for English in ISO 639-1, so the English Wikipedia is at en.wikipedia.org.
The table below lists the active language editions of Wikipedia roughly sorted by the number of articles (excluding redirects and non-article pages).[15]
The table below lists the inactive language editions of Wikipedia.[15]
The table below lists the special editions of Wikipedia.[15]
The Nostalgia Wikipedia is an archive of the English Wikipedia's initial display.
Wikipédia, l'encyclopédie collaborative libre, fêtera ses dix ans en janvier 2011, et a débuté le 23 mars 2001 en version française, mais dès ce jeudi 23 septembre, à neuf ans et demi exactement, la Wikipédia francophone a enregistré officiellement le cap du million d'articles. (Wikipedia, the free collaborative encyclopedia, will celebrate its tenth anniversary in January 2011. It started on March 23, 2001 in its French version, but as of this Thursday, September 23, at exactly nine and a half years old, the French-language Wikipedia has officially reached the one million article mark.)
No passado, as tensões motivadas pelas variantes idiomáticas levaram a propostas para a criação de Wikipédias separadas para o português brasileiro e europeu. Tentativas nesse sentido lançadas em 2005, 2007 e 2009 foram rejeitadas pela Wikimedia Foundation, sob pretexto de que não se trata de idiomas suficientemente diferentes para justificar a cisão.
Media related to Wikipedia at Wikimedia Commons
Wikipedia at Wikinews
Learning materials related to Wikipedia at Wikiversity
Works related to Wikipedia press releases at Wikisource
