Polish Wikipedia (Polish: polska Wikipedia) is the Polish edition of Wikipedia. The ninth edition of Wikipedia, it was started in September 26, 2001. As of October 2009, it has more than 644,000 articles and is the fourth largest Wikipedia edition (after the English, German, and French editions). It is also the largest edition in a Slavic language by the number of articles.
The Polish Wikipedia originated as an independent project under the domain wiki.rozeta.com.pl. At the suggestion of the founders of the English Wikipedia, the site was incorporated in the international project as http://pl.wikipedia.com on January 12, 2002 and as http://pl.wikipedia.org later that year on November 22. To avoid domain squatting that could frustrate potential users, the Polish Wikipedia also has its own domain www.wikipedia.pl that redirects to pl.wikipedia.org.
Polish Wikipedia has quite low depth parameters compared to other Slavic editions. As of September 2009, Polish Wikipedia has the lowest depth parameter among the twenty largest editions of Wikipedia, and the second lowest among editions with 100,000 or more articles (slightly above Volapük Wikipedia). The depth parameter attempts to measure the depth at which topics are covered in Wikipedia. Higher depth is given for more edits per article and more supporting pages, like talk pages, per article.
July 2005: tsca.bot, one of the bots in Polish Wikipedia, was programmed to upload statistics from official government pages about French, Polish and Italian municipalities. In a few months, the bot uploaded more than 40,000 articles.
September 4, 2005: Polish Wikipedia overtook the Dutch Wikipedia in the number of articles, however soon afterwards (September 9) it returned to seventh place after being overtaken by the Italian Wikipedia.
September 18, 2005: Polish Wikipedia overtook Swedish Wikipedia in the number of articles and became the sixth-largest Wikipedia.
September 23, 2005: Polish Wikipedia overtook Italian Wikipedia to become the fifth-largest language edition.
January 15, 2006: Polish Wikipedia overtook Japanese Wikipedia to become the fourth-largest language edition.
October 13, 2009: Polish Wikipedia was cited for "special recognition for social innovation" at the 2009 Jan Łukasiewicz Award ceremony (the award was established for most innovative Polish IT companies).
Polish Wikipedia on DVD
The Polish Wikipedia was first published on a DVD together with the paper edition of the magazine Enter SPECIAL in August 2005. The releaser did not make any attempt to contact the Wikimedia Foundation prior to making the DVD available on the market and the edition itself turned out to be illegal as it violated the GNU GPL license. Additionally, the software used in that edition worked improperly under Microsoft Windows 98.
A new DVD edition was prepared as a joint project of the Polish branch of the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikimedia Polska) and the Polish publisher Helion. It contains articles written before June 4, 2006. The works were completed on November 24, 2006 and the edition was released at the end of July 2007. It cost 39 zlotys.