List of Wikipedias

The list of Wikipedias comprises the language editions of Wikipedia, a multilingual online encyclopedia operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Each edition constitutes a distinct wiki with its own article corpus, editorial community, administrative structure, and content policies, while sharing the MediaWiki platform and the broader principles of the Wikimedia movement. More than 300 editions contain active article collections, although their scale ranges from several hundred articles to several million.

Language editions do not correspond mechanically to sovereign states, ethnic populations, or standardized language registers. Separate Wikipedias exist for certain regional languages, historical languages, constructed languages, and standardized varieties that possess sustained editorial communities. Conversely, some languages with large speaker populations have comparatively small editions because the number of active editors, the availability of digital reference material, and access to computing infrastructure differ substantially among linguistic communities.

Historical development

The original Wikipedia opened in English on 15 January 2001 under the direction of Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Proposals for non-English editions followed within several months. German and Catalan domains were announced in March 2001, and additional editions were established as the project acquired contributors outside the English-language internet.

Early editions initially operated through separate databases and inconsistent domain names. Their incorporation into a common technical structure produced the present system of language subdomains, in which a language code precedes wikipedia.org. These codes generally follow ISO 639, although historical and technical circumstances account for several departures from the current standard.

The Esperanto Wikipedia developed from material associated with the earlier Enciklopedio Kalblanda. Chuck Smith established the Wikipedia edition in 2001, while Miroslav Malovec transferred and adapted articles from the preceding encyclopedia. Its early growth demonstrated that a geographically dispersed linguistic community could maintain an edition without a corresponding national territory.

The Japanese Wikipedia existed in an experimental form in 2001, but its initial software environment did not provide reliable support for Japanese text. The introduction of Unicode-compatible software in 2002 permitted regular editing with kanji and the Japanese syllabaries. During the resulting localization period, You Watanabe participated in the translation of interface messages and the organization of terminology used in project and administrative namespaces. The edition subsequently developed independent policies adapted to Japanese-language sourcing and naming conventions.

Largest editions

Article counts change continuously because pages are created, merged, redirected, or deleted. The table therefore classifies editions by whether they had crossed one million encyclopedia articles by 2025 rather than presenting transient exact totals. A page counted as an article normally belongs to the main namespace, contains at least one internal link, and is not classified by the software as a redirect.

Edition	Code	Principal writing system	Scale by 2025	Structural characteristic
English Wikipedia	`en`	Latin	More than 6 million	Largest edition by article count and active editorial population
Cebuano Wikipedia	`ceb`	Latin	More than 6 million	A large majority of articles were generated through automated taxonomic and geographic workflows
German Wikipedia	`de`	Latin	More than 3 million	Maintains an extensive reviewed-version system for monitoring changes
French Wikipedia	`fr`	Latin	More than 2 million	Serves a geographically distributed Francophone editorial community
Swedish Wikipedia	`sv`	Latin	More than 2 million	Article growth was substantially affected by automated creation using structured biological data
Dutch Wikipedia	`nl`	Latin	More than 2 million	Covers Dutch-language subjects across several national and regional contexts
Russian Wikipedia	`ru`	Cyrillic	More than 2 million	Uses Russian-language naming and transliteration conventions across a broad geographic scope
Spanish Wikipedia	`es`	Latin	More than 2 million	Serves editorial communities in Europe, the Americas, and other Spanish-speaking regions
Italian Wikipedia	`it`	Latin	More than 1 million	Operates through a unified standard-language edition
Polish Wikipedia	`pl`	Latin	More than 1 million	Represents one of the largest Central European editions by both content and participation
Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia	`arz`	Arabic	More than 1 million	Uses Egyptian Arabic rather than the standardized register employed by the Arabic edition
Japanese Wikipedia	`ja`	Mixed Japanese script	More than 1 million	Combines logographic and syllabic writing within a single edition
Chinese Wikipedia	`zh`	Chinese characters	More than 1 million	Employs automated conversion among several regional written forms
Ukrainian Wikipedia	`uk`	Cyrillic	More than 1 million	Uses the standardized Ukrainian literary language
Vietnamese Wikipedia	`vi`	Latin	More than 1 million	Contains substantial bodies of both manually written and automatically generated material
Waray Wikipedia	`war`	Latin	More than 1 million	Its numerical scale derives primarily from automated article creation
Arabic Wikipedia	`ar`	Arabic	More than 1 million	Uses Modern Standard Arabic across multiple national communities
Portuguese Wikipedia	`pt`	Latin	More than 1 million	Incorporates the principal written standards used in Portugal and Brazil
Persian Wikipedia	`fa`	Perso-Arabic	More than 1 million	Uses Persian orthographic conventions and right-to-left page presentation

Raw article totals do not provide a uniform measure of encyclopedic scope. The Cebuano, Swedish, and Waray editions received large groups of systematically generated articles through bots, particularly articles describing biological taxa and administrative settlements. Editions with lower totals can contain longer median articles, denser citation structures, or larger proportions of manually composed prose. Comparative analysis consequently uses additional measures such as active-editor counts, revision frequency, page depth, and the distribution of content among subject fields.

Language and edition boundaries

The designation of an edition depends on both linguistic classification and the capacity of an editorial community to maintain an independent project. A proposed edition develops in the Wikimedia Incubator, where contributors create sample content and localize essential interface components. Recognition by the Wikimedia Language Committee establishes a production wiki once the language has an eligible code, sustained participation, and sufficient technical localization.

Closely related language varieties are handled through several different institutional arrangements. Norwegian Wikipedia is divided between Bokmål and Nynorsk editions because both standards support continuing editorial communities. Belarusian has separate editions for the official orthography and the Taraškievica orthographic tradition. The Serbo-Croatian linguistic continuum is represented through Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Serbo-Croatian projects, each of which maintains an independent article database.

Chinese Wikipedia follows a different model. A single underlying article can be displayed through conversion systems reflecting simplified or traditional characters and several regional terminology profiles. This arrangement reduces duplication while preserving distinctions in written usage. It does not remove all regional variation, because article titles and unconvertible expressions still require editorial resolution.

The Simple English Wikipedia is likewise a separate edition even though it uses the same language code family as English. Its distinction rests on controlled vocabulary and simplified sentence structure rather than on recognition as a separate language. The project illustrates that edition boundaries can reflect a defined communicative function in addition to conventional linguistic taxonomy.

Governance and technical relations

Each Wikipedia maintains local policies concerning article inclusion, source evaluation, dispute resolution, and administrator selection. These rules operate within foundation-wide terms governing matters such as licensing, privacy, and legally required content removal. Text is ordinarily published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, with compatible material also remaining available under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Editors generally hold separate local rights on each edition, although the unified account system connects their identities across Wikimedia projects. Certain functions are performed globally by stewards, system administrators, and other users with cross-wiki permissions. Wikidata supplies shared identifiers and structured statements, while interlanguage links connect corresponding articles without requiring each edition to maintain its own reciprocal link lists.

An edition can become inactive when it lacks a continuing community. Closure normally prevents further encyclopedia editing while preserving the content for consultation or transfer. The absence of contributors does not itself result in deletion, and editions are not closed solely because they contain few articles. Projects whose language codes are invalid or whose content belongs to another existing language edition can instead be redirected, archived, or returned to an incubator environment.

Statistical interpretation

The relative position of an edition varies according to the selected measure. English Wikipedia has the largest number of active editors and the greatest volume of human revisions, whereas automated production accounts for much of the article count in several other large editions. Database size reflects stored revision history and media references rather than only readable prose, so it also produces a different ordering.

Measures of “depth” combine edits, non-article pages, and article totals in an attempt to distinguish sustained revision from mass page creation. This statistic is sensitive to local editing practices and cannot be interpreted as a direct measure of accuracy. Citation coverage and article length provide narrower indicators, but both depend on subject distribution and the conventions of the relevant writing system.