English Wikipedia

The English Wikipediaalso abbreviated as en-WPor simply enwikiis the English-language version of Wikipedia. It is the original Wikipediaand although the project has since expanded to over 300 languagesEnglish Wikipedia remains the largest. It is the de facto global Wikipediain the sense that 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).

Started: January 2001

Founders: Larry SangerJimmy Wales

Current size: 7,165,131 articles

Total edits: 1,342,677,339

Active editors: 279,831 in the past month

English Wikipedia has the most generally comprehensive and high-quality coverage of human knowledge of any Wikipedia or other encyclopediaalthough 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

Unique qualities

• Highly developed bureaucracywith intricate rulesets/processes
• Significant weight placed on adminship (despite ostensibly being "no big deal")
• Very active use of software robots for maintenance tasks
• Categorization of redirects. For exampleen:Template:R with possibilities marks redirect pages with potential to develop into a standalone article.
• Template-based edit request system for each protection level.

Challenges

• Combating vandalism and promotional editing
• Achieving neutrality and maintaining user trust in an increasingly polarized information landscape
• Addressing systemic bias against womenpoor peoplenon-white peopleand other groups underrepresented among editors

Competitors

• Encyclopædia Britannica
• World Book Encyclopedia

Language aspects

There is no set standard on the variety of English to useother than that it should remain consistent within articles. By defaultAmerican spellings tend to dominate over British spellings and other varieties.

• How to destroy Wikipedia essay (in English2001)
• Departure of Larry Sanger (March 2002)
• John Seigenthaler hoax (2005)
• One million articles (in EnglishMarch 2006)
• Essjay controversy (in EnglishMarch 2007)
• SOPA blackout (January 2012)
• Introduction of the VisualEditor (December 2012)
• Introduction of the Pending changes protection feature after test phaseto mitigate disruptive editing without denying constructive contribution from newcomers.
• Addition of the "Template editor" protection level (pink lock) for high-traffic templates (October 2013)
• Orangemoody sockpuppet case (in EnglishAugust 2015)
• Five million articles (in EnglishNovember 2015)
• Addition of the extended confirmed protection option (blue lock) (April 2016)
• Removal of the "Pending Changes Level 2" (orange lock) page protection option (January 2017)
• Removal of Wikidata central descriptions from under page titles of mobile front end/"Minerva" skin (March 2017)
• Fram ban controversy (in EnglishJune 2019)
• Deployment of New Vector skin (January 2023)

• 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 editionsprojects