English Wikipedia Totally Explained

Everything about The English Wikipedia totally explained

The English Wikipedia is the English language edition of Wikipedia. Founded on 15 January 2001 and reaching two million articles by September 2007, it was the first edition of Wikipedia and remains the largest, with more than three times the size of the next largest, the German Wikipedia. As of 2007, approximately one-quarter of articles in all Wikipedias belong to the English language edition, this share having gradually declined from over half in 2003, due to growth of Wikipedias in other languages.

Pioneering edition

The English Wikipedia was the first-established Wikipedia edition and has remained the largest. It has pioneered many conventions, policies and features that have been adopted by other Wikipedia editions. These include "featured articles", the neutral point of view policy, navigation templates, sorting of short "stub" articles into sub-categories, dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration, and weekly collaborations. In turn, the English Wikipedia has adopted features from the German Wikipedia, and from other smaller editions as well.
Many of the most active participants in the Wikimedia Foundation, and developers of the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia, are also English Wikipedia users.

Controversies

Among the controversies in the English Wikipedia is a debate over which national variety of the English language is to be preferred, with the most commonly advocated candidates being American English and British English. There has been a similar issue in the Chinese language Wikipedia, although with a different solution. Many suggestions have been proposed by editors, ranging from standardizing upon a single form of English to forking the English Wikipedia project. A style guideline states, "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." An article should use spelling and grammar variants consistently; for example, center and centre are not to be used in the same article. The guide also states that an article must remain written in whichever dialect the article was initially created, or which first became discernible in the article's history.

Users and editors

English Wikipedia reached 4,000,000 registered user accounts on 1 April 2007, just a little over a year since it has crossed a threshold of 1,000,000 registered user accounts in late February 2006. The number of individual persons who are active editors (either registered or anonymous) at Wikipedia on any given month is much less than these figures.
As the largest Wikipedia edition, and because the English language is such a widely used language, the English Wikipedia draws many users and editors whose native language isn't English. Such users seek information from the English Wikipedia rather than the Wikipedia of their native language simply because the English Wikipedia contains more information. Many successful collaborations have developed between non-native English speakers who add content to English Wikipedia and native English speakers who act as copy editors for those adding content.

Further Information

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