Wikipedia in Catalan hits 600k articles

It’s 20th in number of entries, and top 3 in quality

Front page of the Catalan version of Wikipedia on January 9, 2018
Front page of the Catalan version of Wikipedia on January 9, 2018 / ACN

ACN | Barcelona

January 9, 2019 02:29 PM

The Wikipedia in Catalan hit 600,000 articles on Tuesday evening since it was founded in 2001 – it was the first non-English iteration to publish entries.

The 1st entry was 'àbac', or 'abacus' in English, and the 600,000th was the biography of Pura Velarde, a Catalan neighborhood leader and feminism activist.

The Wikipedia in Catalan is also 20th in number of entries, ahead of languages such as Danish, Czech, Hungarian, Turkish, Hebrew, and Korean. Only 15 versions surpassed the million articles in a ranking topped by English, Cebuano, Swedish, German, and French.

312,000 contributors

So far 312,000 people have contributed to the Catalan edition of the digital encyclopedia, and the joint effort has made this version one of the top three ranked in terms of quality, alongside Russian and Serbian. This list is made assessing the 1,000 most "vital" articles in all languages, according to Amical Wikimedia association of users.

Part of the effort to reach 600,000 articles is due to the Viquidones project, aiming to publish biographies of women in order to reduce the existing gender imbalance in the website.  

In 2018, the Catalan edition of the encyclopedia registered 196.5 million visits, which makes it the 36th most used version out of the 303 existing ones.  

According to 'Ethnologue' project, Catalan is spoken by a total of 9.1 million people including the native and non-native speakers.