English Wikipedia

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English Wikipedia
85%
Logo of the English Wikipedia
Screenshot
Type of site
Internet encyclopedia
Owner Wikimedia Foundation
Created by Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[1]
Website en.wikipedia.org
Commercial No
Registration Optional, but required for certain tasks including
�?protected page edit?
�?page creation?
�?file upload?
Users 36,623,156 users, 1,152 administrators as of 28 June 2019
Launched 15 January 2001; 18 years ago
Content license
Creative Commons Attribution/
Share-Alike 3.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL)
Media licensing varies
The English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online
encyclopedia Wikipedia. Founded on 15 January 2001, it is the first edition of
Wikipedia and, as of April 2019, has the most articles of any of the editions.[2]
As of June 2019, 12% of articles in all Wikipedias belong to the English-language
edition. This share has gradually declined from more than 50 percent in 2003, due
to the growth of Wikipedias in other languages.[3] As of 28 June 2019, there are
5,877,889 articles on the site,[4] having surpassed the 5 million mark on 1
November 2015.[5] In October 2015, the combined text of the English Wikipedia's
articles totalled 11.5 gigabytes when compressed.[6]

The Simple English Wikipedia is a variation in which most of the articles use only
basic English vocabulary. There is also the Old English (�nglisc/Anglo-Saxon)
Wikipedia (angwiki). Community-produced news publications include The Signpost.[7]

Contents
1 Pioneering edition
2 Users and editors
2.1 Arbitration committee
3 Controversies
3.1 Threats against high schools
3.2 Disputed articles
3.3 Varieties of English
4 Wikiprojects, and assessments of articles' importance and quality
5 Graphics
6 Internal news publications
7 See also
8 Footnotes
9 References
10 External links
Pioneering edition
See also: Wikipedia:Milestones
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 Wikipedia editions in some of the other languages. These ideas include
"featured articles",[8] the neutral-point-of-view policy,[9] navigation templates,
[10] the sorting of short "stub" articles into sub-categories,[11] dispute
resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration,[12] and weekly
collaborations.[13]

The English Wikipedia has adopted features from Wikipedias in other languages.
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 users.

Users and editors

Steven Pruitt, as of May 2019, has made more edits on the English Wikipedia than
any other editor.
English Wikipedia statistics
Number of user accounts Number of articles Number of files Number of
administrators
36,623,156 5,877,889 882,227 1,152
The English Wikipedia reached 4,000,000 registered user accounts on 1 April 2007,
[14] just a little over a year since it had crossed a threshold of 1,000,000
registered user accounts in late February 2006.[15]

Over 800,000 editors have edited Wikipedia more than 10 times.[16] 300,000 editors
edit Wikipedia every month;[citation needed] of these, over 30,000 perform more
than 5 edits per month, and a little over 3,000 perform more than 100 edits per
month.[17] By 24 November 2011, a total of 500 million edits had been performed on
the English Wikipedia.[citation needed]

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
been developed between non-native English speakers who successfully add content to
the English Wikipedia and native English speakers who act as copyeditors for them.
[citation needed]