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.[3] As of 15 February 2019, there
are 5,808,118 articles on the site,[4] having surpassed the 5 million mark on 1 November 2015.[5] In
October 2015, the combined text of the English Wikipedia's articles totalled 11.5 gigabytes when
compressed.[6]

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). Community-produced news
publications include The Signpost.[7]

Contents

1 Pioneering edition

2 Users and editors

2.1 Arbitration committee

3 Controversies

3.1 Threats against high schools

3.2 Disputed articles

3.3 Varieties of English

4 Wikiprojects, and assessments of articles' importance and quality

5 Graphics

6 Internal news publications

7 See also

8 Footnotes

9 References

10 External links

Pioneering edition

See also: Wikipedia:Milestones

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 Wikipedia editions in some of the
other languages. These ideas include "featured articles",[8] the neutral-point-of-view policy,[9] navigation
templates,[10] the sorting of short "stub" articles into sub-categories,[11] dispute resolution mechanisms
such as mediation and arbitration,[12] and weekly collaborations.[13]

The English Wikipedia has adopted features from Wikipedias in other languages. These features include
verified revisions from the German Wikipedia (dewiki) and town population-lookup templates from the
Dutch Wikipedia (nlwiki).

Although the English Wikipedia stores images and audio files, as well as text files, many of the images
have been moved to Wikimedia Commons with the same name, as passed-through files. However, the
English Wikipedia also has fair-use images and audio/video files (with copyright restrictions), most of
which are not allowed on Commons.

Many of the most active participants in the Wikimedia Foundation, and the developers of the MediaWiki
software that powers Wikipedia, are English users.

Users and editors

English Wikipedia statistics Number of user accounts Number of articles Number of files
Number of administrators

35,677,948 5,808,118 881,056 1,183

The English Wikipedia reached 4,000,000 registered user accounts on 1 April 2007,[14] just a little over a
year since it had crossed a threshold of 1,000,000 registered user accounts in late February 2006.[15]

Over 800,000 editors have edited Wikipedia more than 10 times.[16] 300,000 editors edit Wikipedia every
month;[citation needed] of these, over 30,000 perform more than 5 edits per month, and a little over
3,000 perform more than 100 edits per month.[17] By 24 November 2011, a total of 500 million edits had
been performed on the English Wikipedia.[citation needed]

As the largest Wikipedia edition, and because English is such a widely used language, the English Wikipedia
draws many users and editors whose native language is not English. Such users may seek information from
the English Wikipedia rather than the Wikipedia of their native language because the English Wikipedia
tends to contain more information about general subjects. Successful collaborations have been developed
between non-native English speakers who successfully add content to the English Wikipedia and native
English speakers who act as copyeditors for them.[citation needed]

Arbitration committee

Main article: Arbitration Committee

The English Wikipedia has an arbitration committee (also known as ArbCom) that consists of a panel of
editors that imposes binding rulings with regard to disputes between other editors of the online
encyclopedia.[18] The committee was created by Jimmy Wales on 4 December 2003 as an extension of
the decision-making power he had formerly held as owner of the site.[19][20]

When initially founded, the committee consisted of 12 arbitrators divided into three groups of four
members each.[19][21] Since then, the committee has gradually expanded its membership to 18
arbitrators.[22][not in citation given]

As with other aspects of the English Wikipedia, some of Wikipedia's sister projects have emulated the
arbitration committee with their own similar versions.[23] For instance, in 2007, an arbitration committee
was founded on the German Wikipedia called the Schiedsgericht [de].