English Wikipedia

The English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Founded on 15 January 2001, it is the first edition of Wikipedia and, as of November 2015, has the most articles of any of the editions. As of February 2016, nearly 13.1% of articles in all Wikipedias belong to the English-language edition. This share has gradually declined from more than 50 percent in 2003, due to the growth of Wikipedias in other languages. There are 5,083,677 articles on the site (live count). In October 2015, the combined text of the English Wikipedia's articles totalled 11.5 gigabytes when compressed. On November 1, 2015, the English Wikipedia announced it had reached 5,000,000 articles and ran a special logo to reflect the milestone.

The Simple English Wikipedia is a variation in which most of the articles use only basic English vocabulary. There is also the Old English (Ænglisc/Anglo-Saxon) Wikipedia (angwiki).

Pioneering edition

The English Wikipedia was the first Wikipedia edition and has remained the largest. It has pioneered many ideas as conventions, policies or features which were later adopted by some of the other-language Wikipedia editions. These ideas include "featured articles", the neutral-point-of-view policy, navigation templates, the sorting of short "stub" articles into sub-categories,dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration, and weekly collaborations.