English Wikipedia is the most-read version of Wikipedia,[2][3] accounting for 48% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining percentage split among the other languages.[4] The English Wikipedia has the most articles of any edition, at 6,861,413 as of August 2024.[5] It contains 10.8% of articles in all Wikipedias,[5] although it lacks millions of articles found in other editions.[1] The edition's
one-billionth edit was made on 13 January 2021.[6]
Editors of the English Wikipedia have pioneered some ideas as conventions, policies or features which were later adopted by Wikipedia editions in some of the other languages. These ideas include "featured articles",[13] the neutral-point-of-view policy,[14] navigation templates,[15] the sorting of short "stub" articles into sub-categories,[16]dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration,[17] and weekly collaborations.[18]
It surpassed six million articles on 23 January 2020.[19] In November 2022, the total volume of the compressed texts of its articles amounted to 20
gigabytes.[20]
The edition's one-billionth edit was made on 13 January 2021 by
Ser Amantio di Nicolao (Steven Pruitt) who as of that date is the user with the highest number of edits on the English Wikipedia, at over four million.[6] Currently, there are 6,861,413 articles created with 922,138 files. The encyclopedia is home to 10.8% of articles in all Wikipedias (down from more than 50% in 2003).[21][22] The English Wikipedia currently has 47,760,159 registered accounts of which 855 are administrators.
Wikipedians
The English Wikipedia reached 4,000,000 registered user accounts on 1 April 2007,[23] over a year since the millionth
Wikipedian registered an account in February 2006.[24]
Over 1,100,000 editors have edited Wikipedia more than 10 times.[25] Over 30,000 editors perform more than 5 edits per month, and over 3,000 perform more than 100 edits per month.[26]
On 1 March 2014, The Economist, in an article titled "The Future of Wikipedia", cited a trend analysis concerning data published by the Wikimedia Foundation stating that "[t]he number of editors for the English-language version has fallen by a third in seven years."[27] The attrition rate for active editors in English Wikipedia was cited by The Economist as substantially in contrast to statistics for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia). The Economist reported that the number of contributors with an average of five or more edits per month was relatively constant since 2008 for Wikipedia in other languages at approximately 42,000 editors within narrow seasonal variances of about 2,000 editors up or down. The number of active editors in English Wikipedia, by "sharp" comparison, was cited as peaking in 2007 at approximately 50,000 and dropping to 30,000 by the start of 2014.
The trend analysis published in The Economist presents Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) as successful in retaining their active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000.[27]
The English Wikipedia has the
Arbitration Committee (also known as ArbCom) that consists of a panel of editors that imposes binding rulings with regard to disputes between other editors of the online encyclopedia.[28] It was created by Jimmy Wales on 4 December 2003 as an extension of the decision-making power he had formerly held as owner of the site.[29][30] When it was founded, the committee consisted of 12
arbitrators divided into three groups of four members each.[29][31]
In 2022, for English Wikipedia, Americans accounted for about 40% of active editors, followed by British and Indian editors accounting for about 10% of each, and Canadian and Australian at about 5%.[32]
A notable discussion within the English Wikipedia community concerns the preference for
national variety of the English language, particularly
American English and
British English.[33] Various suggestions have been made, ranging from standardizing a single form of English to creating separate versions of the English Wikipedia project.[citation needed] According to a style guideline, "the English Wikipedia has no general preference for a major national variety of the language" and "an article on a topic that has strong ties to a particular English-speaking nation uses the appropriate variety of English for that nation."[34]
There have been reports of threats of violence against high schools made on Wikipedia.[36][37][38] For instance, in 2008,
Glen A. Wilson High School was the subject of such a threat.[36][37][38] Additionally, in 2006, a 14-year-old was arrested for making a threat against
Niles West High School on Wikipedia.[39]
A "
WikiProject" is a
group of contributors who want to work together as a team to improve Wikipedia. These groups may focus on a specific topic area (for example,
women's history), a specific location or a specific kind of task (for example, checking newly created pages). As of August 2022, the English Wikipedia had over 2,000 WikiProjects, for which activity varied.[40]
In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale of the quality of articles.[41] Articles are rated by WikiProjects. The range of quality classes begins with "Stub" (very short pages), followed by "Start", "C" and "B" (in increasing order of quality). Community peer review is needed for the article to enter one of the quality classes: either "
good article", "A" or the highest, "
featured article". Of the about 6.5 million articles and lists assessed as of April 2022, more than 6,000 (0.09%) are featured articles, and fewer than 4,000 (0.06%) are featured lists. One featured article per day, as selected by editors, appears on the
main page of Wikipedia.[42][43]
The
Wikipedia Version 1.0 Editorial Team has developed a table (shown below) that displays data of all rated articles by quality and importance, on the English Wikipedia. If an article or list receives different ratings by two or more WikiProjects, then the highest rating is used in the table, pie-charts, and bar-chart. The software auto-updates the data.
Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach featured status via the intensive work of a few editors.[44] A 2010 study found unevenness in quality among featured articles and concluded that the community process is ineffective in assessing the quality of articles.[45]
Community-produced news publications include
The Signpost.[46]The Signpost (previously known as The Wikipedia Signpost)[47] is the English Wikipedia's newspaper.[46][48][49] It is managed by the
Wikipedia community and is published online weekly.[46][50] Each edition contains stories and articles related to the Wikipedia community.[51][52]
Investigative journalism by The Signpost in 2015 on changes to
freedom of panorama copyright restrictions in Europe was covered by publications in multiple languages including German,[59] Italian,[60] Polish,[61] and Russian.[62] Wikipedia users Gamaliel and Go Phightins! became editors-in-chief of The Signpost in January 2015; prior editor-in-chief The ed17 noted that during his tenure the publication expanded its scope by including more reporting on the wider Wikimedia movement and English Wikipedia itself.[63] In a letter to readers upon the newspaper's tenth anniversary, the co-editors-in-chief stressed the importance of maintaining independence from the Wikimedia Foundation in their reporting.[64]
^
abThe number of articles on the English Wikipedia is shown by the
MediaWiki variable {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}, with all Wikipedias as total {{NUMBEROF|ARTICLES|total}} = 63,437,350.
^Schiff, Stacy (2 December 2006).
"Know-alls". The Age. Australia: Fairfax Digital Network.
Archived from the original on 21 April 2016. Retrieved 15 June 2009.
^Fernanda B. Viégas; Martin Wattenberg; Matthew M. McKeon (22 July 2007).
"The Hidden Order of Wikipedia"(PDF). Visual Communication Lab, IBM Research. Archived from
the original(PDF) on 31 October 2007. Retrieved 30 October 2007.
^Poderi, Giacomo, Wikipedia and the Featured Articles: How a Technological System Can Produce Best Quality Articles, Master thesis,
University of Maastricht, October 2008.
^Diener, Andrea (27 June 2015).
"Geben Sie Panoramafreiheit, Sire!" [Give freedom of panorama, sire!]. FAZ – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (in German).
Archived from the original on 29 June 2015. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
^Bayliss, Gemma (January 2013). "Exploring the Cautionary Attitude Toward Wikipedia in Higher Education: Implications for Higher Education Institutions". New Review of Academic Librarianship. 19 (1): 39.
doi:
10.1080/13614533.2012.740439.
ISSN1361-4533.
S2CID61150982.