French Wikipedia
The French Wikipedia is the French-language edition of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. This edition was started on 23 March 2001, two months after the official creation of Wikipedia. It has :fr:Special:Statistics| articles as of , making it the -largest Wikipedia language version, after the English-, Cebuano-, and German-language editions, and the largest Wikipedia edition in a Romance language. It has the third-most edits, and ranks 6th in terms of depth among Wikipedia editions, in addition to being the third-largest Wikipedia edition by number of active users as of January 2025. It was the third edition, after the English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia, to exceed 1 million articles: this occurred on 23 September 2010. In April 2016, the project had 4,657 active editors who made at least five edits in that month.
In 2008, the French encyclopaedia Quid cancelled its 2008 edition, citing falling sales on competition from the French edition of Wikipedia.
As of , there are users, admins and files on the French Wikipedia.
On 2 December 2014, the French-language Wikipedia became the third-largest language edition by number of registered users, overtaking for the first time the German edition, with registered users, behind the English and Spanish language editions.
Statistics
The audience measurement company Médiamétrie questioned a sample of 8,500 users residing in France with access to Internet at home or at their place of work. Médiamétrie found that in June 2007, French Wikipedia had: 7,910,000 unique visitors that visited the site at least once during the month of June 2007 ; 2.7 visits per visitor during the period ; had held the 12th position in "the Top 30 most visited sites in France, excluding Internet applications", according to the criterion of the number of unique visitors and 12th position in "the Top 30 most visited sites in France, including Internet applications", like eMule or Real Networks.By August 2011, French Wikipedia was the 7th most visited site in France, with nearly 16 million unique visitors a month. In April 2012, it had 20 million unique visitors per month, or 2.4 million per day with over 700 million page views.
Study
According to a 2013 study by Taha Yasseri et al., from Oxford Internet Institute, Ségolène Royal and unidentified flying object were the most controversial articles on the French Wikipedia.Based on an analysis of discussions on the French Wikipedia, Sahut concludes that internal disputes over sourcing and admissibility can be understood as a tension between two ideal-typical “knowledge regimes”: a wiki regime, which prioritizes open participation and quantitative growth, and an encyclopedic regime, which emphasizes reliability and verifiable sources. On the French Wikipedia, this has resulted in a hybrid compromise in which strict referencing rules coexist with egalitarian wiki norms such as “N’hésitez pas” and “Supposer la bonne foi.” Sahut finds that the French Wikipedia community applies its sourcing policies in a relatively lenient manner. Although editors frequently discuss the large number of articles that lack references, unsourced material is generally not removed in a systematic way. Rather than enforcing the rules strictly, the community often relies on templates and tags to signal sourcing issues.
The study "Cultural Differences in Collaborative Authoring of Wikipedia" shows a strong negative correlation between a country’s Power distance Index and the frequency of deletion edits in its corresponding Wikipedia language edition. In high-PDI cultures such as France, people are more accustomed to having important decisions made by superiors and therefore tend to avoid actions that invalidate someone else’s work. As a result, contributors on the French Wikipedia are likely to feel uncomfortable about deleting others’ work and are less likely to delete information or links.
The French-language Wikipedia tends to be more formal than the English or German editions, with contributors often addressing each other using formal pronouns, following the conventions described by the T–V distinction.
Differences from other Wikipedias
An important difference with the English Wikipedia is that like the Spanish Wikipedia, or the Portuguese Wikipedia in the past, following a community vote in 2006 the French Wikipedia does not accept any images posted under fair use, with the only exception being logos. As of 2025, this exact ban is still in effect.Another important difference is that while Wikipedia administrators are elected for an indefinite period, anybody can start a formal "motion of no confidence" contesting their status, with the community thereby invited to vote for or against removing their privileges. This also exists on the Spanish and Portuguese Wikipedia, but not on the English Wikipedia.