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English Wikipedia
 | |
Screenshot  The English Wikipedia's home page on 5 June 2023 | |
Type of site | Online encyclopedia |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
| Founder(s) | Jimmy Wales Larry Sanger |
| Editors | English Wikipedia community |
| URL | en |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional; required for certain tasks |
| Users | 48,674,541 users and 847 administrators (as of 7 February 2025) |
| Launched | 15 January 2001 |
Content license | Creative Commons Attribution/ Share-Alike 4.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL) Media licensing varies |
The English Wikipedia is the primary[a] English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.
English Wikipedia is hosted alongside other language editions by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization. Its content, written independently of other editions by volunteer editors known as Wikipedians,[1] is in various varieties of English while aiming to stay consistent within articles. Its internal newspaper is The Signpost.
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 6,951,028 as of February 2025.[b] It contains 10.8% of articles in all Wikipedias,[b] although it lacks millions of articles found in other editions.[1] The edition's one-billionth edit was made on 13 January 2021.[5]
English Wikipedia, often as a stand-in for Wikipedia overall, has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of commercial bias. It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and ideological bias.[6][7] While its reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise in the late 2010s and early 2020s,[8][6][9][c] having become an important fact-checking site.[10][11] English Wikipedia has been characterized as having less cultural bias than other language editions due to its broader editor base.[2]
Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).
- ^ a b Harrison, Stephen (1 September 2021). "Wikipedia Is Trying to Transcend the Limits of Human Language". Slate. Archived from the original on 30 July 2023. Retrieved 17 October 2023.
- ^ a b Sato, Yumiko (19 March 2021). "Non-English Editions of Wikipedia Have a Misinformation Problem". Slate. Archived from the original on 25 August 2023. Retrieved 17 October 2023.
- ^ Anderson, Monica; Hitlin, Paul; Atkinson, Michelle (14 January 2016). "Wikipedia at 15: Millions of readers in scores of languages". Pew Research Center. Archived from the original on 11 August 2023. Retrieved 17 October 2023.
- ^ A455bcd9 (8 February 2021). Wikipedia page views by language over time (PNG). Retrieved 25 June 2021.
- ^ "The English Language Wikipedia Just Had Its Billionth Edit". Vice. 15 January 2021. Archived from the original on 15 January 2021. Retrieved 26 February 2021.
- ^ a b "Happy Birthday, Wikipedia". The Economist. 9 January 2021. Archived from the original on 1 January 2023. Retrieved 22 January 2023.
- ^ Harrison, Stephen (9 June 2020). "How Wikipedia Became a Battleground for Racial Justice". Slate. Archived from the original on 10 February 2023. Retrieved 17 August 2021.
- ^ "Wikipedia is 20, and its reputation has never been higher". The Economist. 9 January 2021. Archived from the original on 31 December 2022. Retrieved 25 February 2021.
- ^ Cooke, Richard (17 February 2020). "Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet". Wired. Archived from the original on 17 December 2022. Retrieved 13 October 2020.
- ^ Hughes, Taylor; Smith, Jeff; Leavitt, Alex (3 April 2018). "Helping People Better Assess the Stories They See in News Feed with the Context Button". Meta. Archived from the original on 11 January 2023. Retrieved 23 January 2023.
- ^ Cohen, Noam (7 April 2018). "Conspiracy videos? Fake news? Enter Wikipedia, the 'good cop' of the Internet". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 14 June 2018.
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