Wikipedia is a free multilingual open-source wiki-based online encyclopedia edited and maintained by a community of volunteer editors, started on January 15th 2001 as an English-language encyclopedia. Non-English editions were soon created: the German and Catalan editions were created on circa 16 March,[1] the French edition was created on 23 March,[2] and the Swedish edition was created on 23 May.[3] As of November 2024, Wikipedia articles have been created in 352 editions, with 339 currently active and 13 closed.[4]
The Meta-Wiki language committee manages policies on creating new Wikimedia projects. To be eligible, a language must have a valid ISO 639 code, be "sufficiently unique", and have a "sufficient number of fluent users".[5]
Wikipédia, l'encyclopédie collaborative libre, fêtera ses dix ans en janvier 2011, et a débuté le 23 mars 2001 en version française, mais dès ce jeudi 23 septembre, à neuf ans et demi exactement, la Wikipédia francophone a enregistré officiellement le cap du million d'articles. (Wikipedia, the free collaborative encyclopedia, will celebrate its tenth anniversary in January 2011. It started on March 23, 2001 in its French version, but as of this Thursday, September 23, at exactly nine and a half years old, the French-language Wikipedia has officially reached the one million article mark.)