English Wikipedia is themost 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 7,096,419 as of November 2025.[b] It contains10.8% of articles in all Wikipedias,[b] although it lacks millions of articles found in other editions.[1] The edition's one-billionth edit was made on 13 January 2021 by editorSteven Pruitt.[5]
Screenshot of Wikipedia's article onEarth, 18 January 2023Opening English Wikipedia's main page with Mozilla Firefox 99 on Ubuntu 20.04
The English Wikipedia surpassed six million articles on 23 January 2020.[12] In November 2022, the total volume of the compressed texts of its articles amounted to 20gigabytes.[13]
The edition's one-billionth edit was made on 13 January 2021 bySer Amantio di Nicolao (Steven Pruitt) who as of that date is the user with the highest number of edits on the English Wikipedia, at over four million.[5] Currently, there are 7,096,419 articles created with 953,817 files. The encyclopedia is home to10.8% of articles in all Wikipedias (down from more than 50% in 2003).[14][15] The English Wikipedia currently has 50,330,880 registered accounts of which 829 are administrators.
Bureaucracy
Editors of the English Wikipedia have pioneered some ideas as conventions, policies or features which were later adopted by Wikipedia editions in some of the other languages. These ideas include "featured articles",[16] the neutral-point-of-view policy,[17] navigation templates,[18] the sorting of short "stub" articles into sub-categories,[19]dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration,[20] and weekly collaborations.[21]
The countries in which the English Wikipedia is the most popular language version of Wikipedia are shown in red.Number of volunteer editors on the English Wikipedia over timeEdits to English Wikipedia by country as of January 2022The English Wikipedia (marked blue in the graph) is the most-read version of Wikipedia, accounting for 48% of the website's global traffic as of 2021.The English Wikipedia has consistently been the most edited Wikipedia language version.
The English Wikipedia reached 4,000,000 registered user accounts on 1 April 2007,[22] over a year since the millionthWikipedian registered an account in February 2006.[23]
Over 1,100,000 volunteer editors have edited Wikipedia more than 10 times.[24] Over 30,000 editors perform more than 5 edits per month, and over 3,000 perform more than 100 edits per month.[25]
On 1 March 2014,The Economist, in an article titled "The Future of Wikipedia", cited a trend analysis concerning data published by the Wikimedia Foundation stating that "[t]he number of editors for the English-language version has fallen by a third in seven years."[26] The attrition rate for active editors in English Wikipedia was cited byThe Economist as substantially in contrast to statistics for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia).The Economist reported that the number of contributors with an average of five or more edits per month was relatively constant since 2008 for Wikipedia in other languages at approximately 42,000 editors within narrow seasonal variances of about 2,000 editors up or down. The number of active editors in English Wikipedia, by "sharp" comparison, was cited as peaking in 2007 at approximately 50,000 and dropping to 30,000 by the start of 2014.
The trend analysis published inThe Economist presents Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) as successful in retaining their active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000.[26]
The English Wikipedia has theArbitration 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.[27] It was created by Jimmy Wales on 4 December 2003 as an extension of the decision-making power he had formerly held as owner of the site.[28][29] When it was founded, the committee consisted of 12arbitrators divided into three groups of four members each.[28][30]
In 2022, for English Wikipedia, Americans accounted for about 40% of active editors, followed by British and Indian editors accounting for about 10% of each, and Canadian and Australian at about 5%.[31]
Criticism
Two radically different versions of the Wikipedia biography Klee Irwin (now deleted)[32] presented to the public within days of each other: Wikipedia's susceptibility to edit wars and bias is an issue often raised by the project's critics.
The free online encyclopediaWikipedia has been criticized since its creation in 2001. Most of the criticism has been directed toward its content, community ofestablished volunteer users, process, and rules. Critics have questioned itsfactual reliability, the readability and organization of its articles, the lack of methodicalfact-checking, and itspolitical bias.
Concerns have also been raised aboutsystemic bias alonggender,racial,political, corporate, institutional, and national lines. Conflicts of interest arising from corporate campaigns to influence content have also been highlighted. Further concerns include the vandalism and partisanship facilitated by anonymous editing,clique behavior (from contributors as well asadministrators and other top figures),social stratification between a guardian class and newer users, excessive rule-making, edit warring, and uneven policy application.
A notable discussion within the English Wikipedia community concerns the preference fornational variety of the English language, particularlyAmerican English andBritish English.[33] Various suggestions have been made, ranging from standardizing a single form of English to creating separate versions of the English Wikipedia project.[citation needed] According to a style guideline, "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."[34]
"Good articles on Wikipedia" redirects here. For the Wikipedia project page, seeWikipedia:Good articles.
A "WikiProject" is agroup of contributors who want to work together as a team to improve Wikipedia. These groups may focus on a specific topic area (for example,women's history), a specific location or a specific kind of task (for example, checking newly created pages). As of August 2022, the English Wikipedia had over 2,000 WikiProjects, for which activity varied.[42]
In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale of the quality of articles.[43] Articles are rated by WikiProjects. The range of quality classes begins with "Stub" (very short pages), followed by "Start", "C" and "B" (in increasing order of quality). Community peer review is needed for the article to enter one of the quality classes: either "good article", "A" or the highest, "featured article". Of the about 6.5 million articles and lists assessed as of April 2022, more than 6,000 (0.09%) are featured articles, and fewer than 4,000 (0.06%) are featured lists. One featured article per day, as selected by editors, appears on themain page of Wikipedia.[44][45]
Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach featured status via the intensive work of a few editors.[46] A 2010 study found unevenness in quality among featured articles and concluded that the community process is ineffective in assessing the quality of articles.[47]
^abThe number of articles on the English Wikipedia is shown by theMediaWiki variable{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}, with all Wikipedias as total{{NUMBEROF|ARTICLES|total}} = 65,988,753.
^Despite this praise, Wikipedia does not recognize itself as a reliable source.
^Fernanda B. Viégas; Martin Wattenberg; Matthew M. McKeon (22 July 2007)."The Hidden Order of Wikipedia"(PDF).Visual Communication Lab, IBM Research. Archived fromthe original(PDF) on 31 October 2007. Retrieved30 October 2007.
^Poderi, Giacomo,Wikipedia and the Featured Articles: How a Technological System Can Produce Best Quality Articles, Master thesis,University of Maastricht, October 2008.
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