English Wikipedia

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

English Wikipedia (abbreviated en-WP) is the English-language version of Wikipedia. It is the original Wikipedia, and although the project has since expanded to over 300 languages, English Wikipedia remains the largest. It is the de facto global Wikipedia, in the sense that smaller Wikipedias look to the English Wikipedia as a source for translations into their language (efforts are ongoing as of 2020 to establish a true language-independent global Wikipedia).

Facts and statistics[edit]

Started: January 2001

Founders: Larry Sanger, Jimmy Wales

Current size: 6,792,514 articles

Total edits: 1,207,119,691

Active editors: 124,211 in the past month

Coverage[edit]

English Wikipedia has the most generally comprehensive and high-quality coverage of human knowledge of any Wikipedia or other encyclopedia, although its quality remains uneven across different areas.[1]

Areas of strength
  • Breaking news and current events
  • Popular culture
  • Sports
  • Hard sciences
Areas of weakness
  • Social sciences
  • Humanities
  • Arts
  • Geography and culture of non-English-speaking parts of the world

Operation[edit]

Unique qualities
Challenges
  • Combating vandalism and promotional editing
  • Achieving neutrality and maintaining user trust in an increasingly polarized information landscape
  • Addressing systemic bias against women, poor people, non-white people, and other groups underrepresented among editors
Competitors
Language aspects

There is no set standard on the variety of English to use, other than that it should remain consistent within articles. By default, American spellings tend to dominate over British spellings and other varieties.

History and impact[edit]

Milestones/events[edit]

Impact[edit]

  • One of the most trafficked websites in the world,[2] attracting around 1.5 billion visitors per month (as of March 2020)
  • Largest and most comprehensive record of humanity's collective knowledge in history
  • Inspired many other language editions, projects

References[edit]