Catalan Wikipedia


The Catalan Wikipedia is the Catalan-language edition of the Wikipedia free online encyclopedia. It was created on 16 March 2001, just a few minutes after the first non-English Wikipedia, the German edition. For two months it was the only active one to have articles in a language other than English, while the German version remained dormant.
With articles, it is the -largest Wikipedia and the fifth-largest Wikipedia in a Romance language. In April 2016, the project had 582 active editors who made at least five edits in that month.

Creation

On 16 March 2001, Jimmy Wales announced that he wanted to create Wikipedias in other languages and mentioned that there was interest in creating a Catalan version. The first tests were made on the deutsche.wikipedia.com, and a few minutes later, the Catalan Wikipedia was created in the catalan.wikipedia.com domain.
The first edit on a non-English Wikipedia was at 21:07 UTC, 16 March 2001, made to the Catalan main page. The first contribution in a non-English article dates from 17 March at 01:41 UTC in the article Àbac. Despite being created after the German Wikipedia, for about two months it was the only non-English Wikipedia that contained articles.
After some time, the domain changed to ca.wikipedia.com and later to ca.wikipedia.org. About 2003 its community started to use the name "Viquipèdia" when talking about this edition of Wikipedia. Nowadays, this word is used in Catalan language to refer to the whole Wikipedia. About 2005, the domain www.viquipedia.net was registered and it redirects to ca.wikipedia.org. In 2007, www.viquipedia.cat was also registered and redirected.
The first registered user was probably AstroNomer, presumably used only to make some registration tests, but the first registered user to make lasting contributions was Cdani, the same user cited in Jimbo Wales' message.
In 2005 the Catalan Wikipedia community debated on which name of the Catalan language to present in the main page and other policy pages, either català, "Catalan", valencià, "Valencian", or a combination of both català-valencià and català o valencià. Although there was not a consensus on any of the proposals, users agreed that in articles relevant to the Valencian Community, the name "Valencian" was to be used; on all other articles "Catalan" is preferred. The main page avoids making reference to a particular nomenclature, by simply stating aquesta versió, "this version".

Milestones and historical main pages

Evolution of the number of articles



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at:20/09/2006 shift: align:right text:40.000
at:04/01/2007 shift: align:right text:50.000
at:31/08/2007 shift: align:right text:75.000
at:18/01/2008 shift: align:right text:100.000
at:12/08/2008 shift: align:right text:125.000
at:28/12/2008 shift: align:right text:150.000
at:21/09/2009 shift: align:right text:200.000
at:29/06/2010 shift: align:right text:250.000
at:22/12/2010 shift: align:right text:300.000
at:25/08/2011 shift: align:right text:350.000
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at:11/03/2016 shift: align:right text:500.000
at:08/01/2019 shift: align:right text:600.000

Reception

In an academic study published in 2017, seventy-seven university students, most with Catalan and/or Spanish as their native languages, made contributions to the English, Catalan and Spanish Wikipedias as part of assessed work and responded to questionaries. The students preferred the English Wikipedia when looking for general information despite the fact that English was the language they reported being less proficient at: "In many of the open comments on the differences between language editions, the students suggested that the English version was better, more complete or more reliable." Specifically, the participants were asked, "If an article is available in Catalan, Spanish and English, which version are you most likely to read first?" The majority responded that they read articles in English first: "The English version was seen by many of the students as the main reference page, and they stated that they used it 'by default',... The students responded to this question after having written a Wikipedia article and undergoing the process of publishing it."