English Spoken Course

The English Wikipedia is the primary[a] 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 nonprofit organization. Its content is written independently of other editions[1] 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,[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 6,738,165 as of November 2023.[5] It contains 10.9% of articles in all Wikipedias,[5] although it lacks millions of articles found in other editions.[1] The edition's one-billionth edit was made on January 13, 2021.[6]

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.[7][8] While its reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise in the late 2010s and early 2020s,[9][7][10][b] having become an important fact-checking site.[11][12] English Wikipedia has been characterized as having less cultural bias than other language editions due to its broader editor base.[2]

Articles

Screenshot of Wikipedia's article on Earth, January 18, 2023

Opening English Wikipedia's main page with Mozilla Firefox 99 on Ubuntu 20.04

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",[13] the neutral-point-of-view policy,[14] navigation templates,[15] the sorting of short "stub" articles into sub-categories,[16] dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration,[17] and weekly collaborations.[18]

It surpassed six million articles on 23 January 2020.[19] In November 2022, the total volume of the compressed texts of its articles amounted to 20 gigabytes.[20]

The edition's one-billionth edit was made on 13 January 2021 by Ser 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.[6] Currently, there are 6,738,165 articles created with 910,406 files. The encyclopedia is home to 10.9% of articles in all Wikipedias (down from more than 50% in 2003).[21][22] The English Wikipedia currently has 46,403,755 registered accounts of which 879 are administrators.

English varieties

One controversy in the English Wikipedia concerns which national variety of the English language is to be preferred, two candidates being American English and British English.[33] Suggestions range from standardizing upon a single form of English to forking the English Wikipedia project.[citation needed] A style guideline states, "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]Disputed articles

A 2013 study from Oxford University concluded that the most disputed articles on the English Wikipedia tended to be broader issues, while on other language Wikipedias the most disputed articles tended to be regional issues; this is due to the English language's status as a global lingua franca, which means that some who edit the English Wikipedia have English as their second language. The study stated that the most disputed entries on the English Wikipedia were: George W. Bush, anarchism, Muhammad, list

English spoken course.