The number of Wikipedia articles in English has exceeded 6 million

The world online encyclopedia Wikipedia has surpassed another milestone this week: the number of articles on the English version of the site has exceeded six million.

According to the head of Wikimedia (the non-profit organization that supports Wikipedia) Ryan Merkley, this figure, after almost 20 years since the founding of the resource, shows “what people can do when they work together”.

The 6 millionth published article is dedicated to Maria Elise Turner Lauder, a 19th-century Canadian schoolteacher, writer and traveler. The article was written by Rosie Stevenson-Goodnight, longtime editor of Wikipedia.

The online encyclopedia is available in almost three hundred languages, but the largest number of articles are written in English. The German version ranks second in popularity after the English version — it contains 3 million articles. It is followed by the French version — more than 2 million articles.

The English section of the resource is also the most visited part of the site. According to available data, users from all over the world visit this section on average about 255 million times daily. According to SimilarWeb, Wikipedia itself is the eighth most visited website in the world.

In order to attract as many authors as possible to the resource, writing in different languages (including very rare ones), Wikipedia representatives hold presentations and seminars in different parts of the world. The site is also constantly improving tools that facilitate the process of writing, publishing and citing articles.

When creating Wikipedia, its founder Jimmy Wales set as his goal “to provide the world with free access to the totality of all human knowledge”. According to one estimate, to collect all the human knowledge on the site, it would take about 105 million articles to collect, which may take another 20 years.