English Wikipedia
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 most 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: 6,284,335 articles
Total edits: 1,013,995,761
Active editors: 139,878 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
- Highly developed bureaucracy, with intricate rulesets/processes
- Significant weight placed on adminship (despite ostensibly being "no big deal")
- Very active use of software robots for maintenance tasks
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
- How to destroy Wikipedia essay (in English, 2001)
- Departure of Larry Sanger (2002)
- John Seigenthaler hoax (2005)
- One million articles (in English, 2006)
- Essjay controversy (in English, 2007)
- SOPA blackout (2012)
- Introduction of the VisualEditor (2012)
- Five million articles (in English, 2015)
- Orangemoody sockpuppet case (in English, 2015)
- Fram ban controversy (in English, 2019)
Impact
- 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