Wikipedia:Six million articles
The English Wikipedia has reached 6,000,000 articles with
Maria Elise Turner Lauder,
19th-century Canadian school teacher, writer and philanthropist,
created by Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight (User:Rosiestep) on 2020-01-23 at 18:59 UTC.
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.
— Jimmy Wales, co-founder
Wikipedia was founded in 2001 as a project to build an online, free-access, free-content encyclopedia entirely from scratch. Since then, it has grown to be the largest encyclopedia ever created, comprising more than six million articles in English, while still relying on the contributions of volunteers.
The English Wikipedia community thanks the millions of users whose edits over the past nineteen-plus years have made this remarkable accomplishment possible.
Articles created near the same time included:
- Lidia Kulikovski, a Moldovan librarian and bibliographer, by User:Gikü
- Videniškiai, a historic village in Lithuania, by User:Renata3
- Giovanni Prodi, an Italian mathematician, by User:SD0001
- Mysore Sand Sculpture Museum, a museum in India, by User:Dee03
- Egon Hartmann, a German architect, by User:Kusma
- Castle Folds, a Romano-British walled settlement, by User:Andrew Davidson
- See more articles
There's much more to see and do
However, 6 million articles on English Wikipedia is only a small portion of human knowledge. Did you know that within the Wikimedia ecosystem, we have:
- Wikipedia in more than 300 language editions with over 50 million articles in total.
- 75+ million items in Wikidata, the free structured knowledge database
- 58+ million freely usable media files in Wikimedia Commons to which anyone can contribute
- Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikibooks and other projects in 200+ languages
Wikipedia has revolutionized our access to knowledge, but there is still lots of work to do:
- Did you know that only 18% of all biographies in English Wikipedia are about women? This is something the Wikimedia community is studying and addressing with projects like WikiProject:Women in Red.
- Only a small fraction of Wikipedia's articles have multimedia of any kind. With video sites like YouTube being one of the most popular in the world, less than 0.2% of Wikipedia articles contain video. You can help at WikiProject Wiki Makes Video.
- Just 1 in 150 of our articles are marked good or featured, which indicates that they have passed a review to check that they are broad, detailed, well-referenced and satisfy our other content policies and guidelines. Find out how to help at Wikipedia:Content assessment.
How can you help?
We are currently working on the future strategy for the movement for the year 2030, which you can read and provide feedback on. Join us!