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Screenshot ![]() Main Page of the English Wikipedia in January 2023 | |
Type of site | Internet encyclopedia |
---|---|
Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
URL | en |
Commercial | No |
Registration | Optional; required for certain tasks |
Users | 47,830,304 users and 855 administrators (as of 18 August 2024) |
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 is written independently of other editions[1] in various varieties of English, 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 6,869,454 as of August 2024.[5] It contains 10.8% of articles in all Wikipedias,[5] although it lacks millions of articles found in other editions.[1] The edition's one-billionth edit was made on 13 January 2021.[6]
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.[7][8] While its reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise in the late 2010s and early 2020s,[9][7][10][b] having become an important fact-checking site.[11][12] English Wikipedia has been characterized as having less cultural bias than other language editions due to its broader editor base.[2]
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