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. English Wikipedia is hosted alongside other language editions by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit 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 and has the most articles of any edition, at as of . It contains 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. 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", 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. It surpassed six million articles on 23 January 2020. In November 2022, the total volume of the compressed texts of its articles amounted to 20 gigabytes.