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English Wikipedia

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English Wikipedia

Screenshot  The Main Page of the English Wikipedia.
URL	http://en.wikipedia.org/
Commercial?	Charitable
Launched	15 January 2001

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 as many articles as the next largest, the German Wikipedia. As of 2009, 22.3% of articles in all Wikipedias belong to the English language edition; this share has gradually declined from more than 50% in 2003, due to the growth of Wikipedias in other languages. There are currently 2,931,775 articles on the site.

Pioneering edition

English Wikipedia contributors by country as of December 2007

Main sizeable countries from which Wikipedians contribute.

The English Wikipedia was the first 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, the 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 smaller editions.

Many of the most active participants in the Wikimedia Foundation, and developers of the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia, are English Wikipedia users.

Users and editors

In April 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a usability study on the English Wikipedia, questioning users about the editing mechanism

English Wikipedia reached 4,000,000 registered user accounts on 1 April 2007, just a little over a year since it had crossed a threshold of 1,000,000 registered user accounts in late February 2006. However, the number of individuals who are active editors (either registered or anonymous) on any given month is much less.

As the largest Wikipedia edition, and because English is such a widely used language, the English Wikipedia draws many users and editors whose native language is not English. Such users seek information from the English Wikipedia rather than the Wikipedia of their native language because the English Wikipedia tends to contain 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 them.

Arbitration Committee

The English Wikipedia has an 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. The Committee was created by Jimmy Wales on December 4, 2003 as an extension of the decision-making power he had formerly held as owner of the site.

When initially founded, the Committee consisted of 12 arbitrators divided into three groups of four members each. Since then, the Committee has gradually expanded to its current size of 18 seats.

Like other aspects of the English Wikipedia, Wikipedia's sister projects have emulated the Arbitration Committee with their own similar versions. In 2007, an Arbitration Committee was founded on the German Wikipedia called the Schiedsrichter.

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. 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, color and colour are not to be used in the same article, since they represent American and British English, respectively. The guide also states that an article must remain in the same dialect in which it was first created, or which first became discernible in the article's history.

There has been a similar issue in the Chinese language Wikipedia concerning regional differences in how the language is written, as well as in the Portuguese Wikipedia between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese.

See also

• History of Wikipedia
• Criticism of Wikipedia

Notes and references