English Wikipedia
The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.
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 | 46,952,792 users, 869 administrators as of 16 February 2024 |
| Launched | 15 January 2001 |
Content license | Creative Commons Attribution/ Share-Alike 4.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL) Media licensing varies |
English Wikipedia is hosted alongside other language editions by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization. Its content is written independently of other editions 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, accounting for 48% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining percentage split among the other languages. The English Wikipedia has the most articles of any edition, at 6,784,505 as of February 2024. It contains 10.9% of articles in all Wikipedias, although it lacks millions of articles found in other editions. The edition's one-billionth edit was made on January 13, 2021.
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. While its reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise in the late 2010s and early 2020s, having become an important fact-checking site. English Wikipedia has been characterized as having less cultural bias than other language editions due to its broader editor base.