Wikipedia in Catalan reaches 600.000 articles

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 1^st entry was ‘àbac’, or ‘abacus’ in English, and the 600,000^th was the biography of Pura Velarde, a Catalan neighbourhood leader and feminism activist.

The Wikipedia in Catalan is now 20^th 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 36^th 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.