CEE/Newsletter/November 2018/Contents/Esperanto report

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Esperanto report: 250 000 articles on Esperanto Wikipedia[edit]

By KuboF Hromoslav
Special 250 000 articles logo

It was a nice day, 18th of September 2018, the Sun was shining, the birds was singing and the Esperanto Wikipedia has reached 250 000 articles.

The article is about French municipality Livaie, written by user Dominik.

Esperanto Wikipedia was founded as the 11th language version, as early as in 2001 - the same year as the entire Wikipedia project was born. For brief period of about 2 weeks it had more articles than the German one, but lately the German community get bigger and overrun it. Now, Esperanto Wikipedia serves its users about 1,5 million times per month (new page view every 2 seconds) by its online version alone. Additionally, more users are served by offline versions, like on the computer donated by World Esperanto Youth Organization to the local Esperanto community in Burundi in 2015 on recommendation of Esperanto and Free Knowledge.

In early times (2005-2006), when the community was defining itself and the Wikipedia, robots was used for mass article creation for the only one time. With about 35 000 robot-created articles, they consist only somewhat less than 15% of all articles. Now, the community is hand-writing about 30 new articles per day. By number of articles and effective usage, Esperanto Wikipedia belongs to Wikipedias of small-to-medium European languages. To put it into context - before 135 years, there was no Esperanto speakers at all and the language have gained its speakers without using army or similar force methods, now spreading thru the world with its message of universal understanding and peace.

About this important milestone informed even the Universal Esperanto Association by its 757th Press release (available also on Esperanto Wikisource, CC BY 4.0).