wikipedia

Catalan version of the free online encyclopedia boasts the first article written not in English

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

The 2015 Mobile World Congress, which takes place each year in Barcelona, has shattered the records by hosting more than 93,000 visitors from 200 different countries, as reported by event organiser GSMA on Thursday, the last day of the trade fair. Thisyear’s attendance exceeded by 9% the figures recorded in 2014 and by 45% the number of people who visited the event during its first edition in 2006. The 2015 Mobile World Congress confirmed itself as the global platform for the cell-phone-related industries, where a large number of news and products were unveiled for the first time by world-class companies such as Samsung, HTC, Sony, Microsoft and Google. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Sundar Pichai (Google) and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) were among this edition's main speakers.

On the second day of the Mobile World Congress, which is the largest event of the mobile industry and is currently being held in Barcelona, the GSMA announced the Global Mobile Award winners in more than 30 categories and Blackberry presented a new phone oriented towards the business sector. If Then This That won the Best Overall Prize in the app category and LG’s G3 and the iPhone 6 shared the Best Smartphone award. In the featured keynotes speech, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales remarked on the importance of minority languages on the internet. In addition, Wales presented his project to provide free access to Wikipedia in developing countries, following Monday's announcements by Google and Facebook to also provide internet access to the entire planet.

Speaking at the V Fórum Impulsa in Girona last Friday, the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, discussed how the online encyclopaedia "protects and expands knowledge" of Catalan. In fact, it was one of the first languages to launch articles on the site, after English and German, and has now already amassed more than 400,000. Wales has highlighted Catalonia’s "passion for its language," and compared it with the Welsh Wikipedia, which is also “extremely active” despite Welsh being a relatively little spoken language. The creator of the free encyclopaedia was one of the featured speakers at the fifth edition of the Fórum Impulsa in Girona.

The ‘Viquipèdia’, the Wikipedia version in Catalan language, is currently ranked 10th out of the 272 languages used in this encyclopaedia quality rankings.