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Type of site | Online encyclopedia project |
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Available in | English |
Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
Created by | English wiki community |
URL | en |
Commercial | No |
Registration | Optional, but needed for some tasks including
|
Launched | 15 January 2001 |
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 Wikipedia online encyclopedia. English is the first language in which Wikipedia was written. It was started on 15 January 2001. It is the largest encyclopedia in the world, and the largest version of Wikipedia since April 2019.[1] It has 6,867,370 articles as of 14 August 2024.[2] In October 2015, the total volume of the compressed texts of the English Wikipedia's articles added up to 23.2 gigabytes.
The Simple English Wikipedia is a variation in which most of the articles use only basic English vocabulary (simplewiki). There is also the Old English (Ænglisc/Anglo-Saxon) Wikipedia (angwiki). It has a newsletter called The Signpost.
Wikipedias in other languages have imitated some of its technical and organizational features.
As the English Wikipedia is very popular, there can be many people editing the Wiki in one minute. This made recent changes less effective for understanding changes. Instead, editors can select and watch for changes in particular articles, using the "watchlist" feature of MediaWiki. Both watchlist and recent changes can be filtered to show particular kinds of edits, such as edits from IP addresses or edits that may possibly be vandalism. Some editors use special software to detect and fix vandalism.[3][4]
Some people think that the English Language Wikipedia shows bias and unfairness.[5] Editors of reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned Wikipedia's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[6] An example of bias is that around 90% of Wikipedia editors are male.[7] Other people think that Wikipedia is more useful than other encyclopedias because it is large and can be updated quickly.
In 2010, the logo of the English Wikipedia like most Wikipedia's was slightly changed. However, some Wikipedias, like the Simple English Wikipedia, still kept the old logo.