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From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For this Wikipedia that has more basic English, see Simple English Wikipedia.
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The English Wikipedia's logo
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The English Wikipedia's home page on 5 June 2023
Type of site
Online encyclopedia
Available inEnglish
OwnerWikimedia Foundation
Created byEnglish Wikipedia community
URLen.wikipedia.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional, but needed for some tasks including
  • • protected page edit 
  • • page creation 
  • • file upload 
Users48696841 users and 847 administrators (as of 12 February 2025)
Launched15 January 2001; 24 years ago (2001-01-15)
Content license
Creative Commons Attribution/
Share-Alike 4.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL)
Media licensing varies

The English Wikipedia is the English language edition of the Wikipedia. English is the first language in which Wikipedia was written. It was started on 15 January 2001. It is the largest encyclopedia in the world, and the largest version of Wikipedia since April 2019.[1] It has 6,953,084 articles as of 12 February 2025.[2] In October 2015, the total volume of the compressed texts of the English Wikipedia's articles added up to 23.2 gigabytes.[source?]

An alternate logo from late 2001 to 2003
The English language Wikipedia page from 18 January 2012, illustrating its international blackout in opposition to SOPA and PIPA.

The Simple English Wikipedia is a variation in which most of the articles use only basic English vocabulary (simplewiki). There is also the Old English (Ænglisc/Anglo-Saxon) Wikipedia (angwiki).

Comparisons with other Wikipedia sites

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Wikipedia sites in other languages have imitated some of its technical and organizational features. It has a newsletter called The Signpost. As the English Wikipedia is very popular, there can be many people editing the Wikipedia in one minute. This made recent changes less effective for understanding changes. Instead, editors can select and watch for changes in particular articles, using the Watchlist feature of MediaWiki.[source?]

Both Watchlist and Recent changes can be filtered to show particular kinds of edits, such as edits from IP addresses or edits with signs of vandalism. Some editors use special software to detect and fix vandalism.[3][4]

Controversies

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The Feb. 2007 removal of an anti-Jewish critique of the NGO War on Want, in Wikipedia, with the new version on the right.
Excerpt from a 2013 review that rejects "Good Article" status for The Holocaust article, cited by PFanzelter (2015).

Some believe that the English Wikipedia shows significant bias and unfairness.[5] Editors of reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned Wikipedia's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[6]

Gender bias

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An example of bias is that around 90% of Wikipedia editors are male, mostly White.[7] Others think that Wikipedia is more useful than other encyclopedias because it is large and can be updated quickly.[source?] In 2010, the logo of the English Wikipedia like most Wikipedia's was slightly changed. However, some Wikipedias, like the Simple English Wikipedia, still kept the old logo.

The English Wikipedia, as one of the most visited websites worldwide,[8] has been criticized for repeated occurrences of on-site antisemitism.[9][10]

Whitewashing of Nazi war criminals

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The English Wikipedia was criticized for condoning the systematic whitewashing of Nazi war criminals on the platform.[11] For instance, Arthur Nebe (a senior SS official who invented mobile gas chambers to kill Jews) was portrayed as a savior of Jews by users who distorted a cited source that actually said the opposite.[11] SS units responsible for the Holocaust were either depicted as brave fighters or described in passive voice to make their atrocities look normal.[11]

Those who corrected the false content had also faced persistent harassment from pro-Nazi users, some of whom were found to have repeatedly cited materials from Holocaust-denying sources (e.g. Journal of Historical Review, Nation Europa and Franz Kurowski[11]), misrepresented them as academic consensus and gamed the rules to prevent them from being corrected.[11] The violations continued for years with limited administrative intervention,[11] which promoted Nazi sympathy among young readers and hurt efforts to preserve the historical truth.[11] German military historian Jens Westemeier commented on the issue,[11]

The English Wikipedia pages are far more sympathetic towards the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS than the German ones [. ...] Wikipedia and Amazon are the worst distributors of pro-Nazi perspectives and the ["clean"] Wehrmacht myth.

Holocaust distortion

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In 2023, Holocaust historians Prof. Jan Grabowski and Dr. Shira Klein published a 57-page article titled Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust[12] in The Journal of Holocaust Research wherein they reported to have found widespread distortion of Poland's Holocaust history on the English Wikipedia,[10][12] which involved the exaggeration[10][12] of Jewish collaboration with Nazi/Soviet occupiers, invention of Jewish "atrocities" against Poles, downplaying of Polish collaboration with Nazi/Soviet occupiers and blaming Jews for their own suffering in the Holocaust.[10][12]

Prof. Grabowski and Dr. Klein also criticized English Wikipedia's administrators and the Wikimedia Foundation's lack of will to handle,[10][12] leaving the site vulnerable to disinformation:

Wikipedia’s administrators have largely failed to uphold Wikipedia’s policies [. ...] unable to deal with the issue of persistent distortion [...] Wikipedia’s articles [...] have become a hub of misinformation and antisemitic canards.

On another occasion, Prof. Grabowski said,[10]

As a historian, I was aware [...] of various distortions [...] of the Holocaust on Wikipedia. What I found shocking, was the sheer scale [...] and the small number of individuals needed to distort the history of one of the greatest tragedies in the history of humanity.

Distortion of Jewish history

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In 2024, independent journalist investigations uncovered a large-scale off-site canvassing campaign to rewrite Jewish history and reshape the narrative surrounding the Israel–Palestine conflict, which involved 40 accounts having made at least 2,000,000 edits to over 10,000 Jewish-related articles.[13]

The off-site canvassing campaign was coordinated by an 8,000-member Tech for Palestine Discord channel,[13] where the organizers provided the participants in-depth training (e.g. strategy planning sessions, group audio "office hour" chats)[13] on getting used to Wikipedia's site operation,[13] assigning participants (in groups of 2~3) to edit hundreds of articles in rotation,[13] and gaming the rules to block others from correcting them.[13]

Reported examples of their revisionist[14] edits include[13]

  • Removal of "Land of Israel" from the origin of Jews in Jewish-related articles
  • Removal of mentions of 16th century Jewish immigration to Israel in Jewish-related articles
  • Removal of mentions of Hamas' 1988 charter which involved the incitement to mass murder of Jews
  • Removal of mentions of the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem's alliance with Hitler[15][16] in Holocaust-related articles
  • Redefinition of Jews as an "ethnoreligious group and cultural community" from "ethnoreligious group and nation from the Levant" in Jewish-related articles

On 12 December 2024, English Wikipedia's arbitration committee announced that two editors[17] had been site-banned indefinitely for off-site canvassing[13][17] and "encouraging other users to game the extended confirmed restriction and engage in disruptive editing."[17] Another three editors have also been sanctioned for similar reasons.[17] On January 17, 2025, English Wikipedia's arbitration committee further voted to impose indefinite topic-bans on multiple longtime editors associated with the organized campaign.[18] ADL's CEO Jonathan Greenblatt commented,[18]

[I]t is now imperative for Wikipedia to [...] undo the harm caused by these rogue but prolific editors who [...] wreaked havoc across the platform [. ...] a systemic problem [...] that needs immediate action.

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References

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  1. ↑ 836276 (about 14 percent) more than the Cebuano Wikipedia. See m:List of Wikipedias.
  2. ↑ Statistics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Archived 2008-06-24 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved May 10, 2020
  3. ↑ jesse.hicks (February 18, 2014). "This machine kills trolls: How Wikipedia's robots and cyborgs snuff out vandalism". The Verge. Archived from the original on August 27, 2014. Retrieved July 16, 2020.
  4. ↑ "Wikipedia:Cleaning up vandalism/Tools". Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. July 9, 2020. Archived from the original on October 26, 2023. Retrieved July 16, 2020.
  5. ↑ Simon Waldman, Who knows? Archived 2011-09-05 at the Wayback Machine The Guardian, October 26, 2004
  6. ↑ Robert McHenry, "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia Archived 2006-01-16 at the Wayback Machine", Tech Central Station, November 15, 2004.
  7. ↑ Simonite, Tom (October 22, 2013). "The Decline of Wikipedia". MIT Technology Review. Archived from the original on June 19, 2015. Retrieved October 31, 2014.
  8. ↑ "Most Visited Websites in Worldwide 2024 | Open .Trends". Semrush. Retrieved December 12, 2024.
  9. ↑
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 Grabowski, Jan; Klein, Shira (February 9, 2023). "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust". The Journal of Holocaust Research. 37 (2): 133–190. doi:10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939. Retrieved October 24, 2024.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7
  14. ↑
  15. ↑
  16. ↑
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 17.3
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1

Other websites

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to English Wikipedia.
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