Welsh Wikipedia
The Welsh Wikipedia (Welsh: Wicipedia Cymraeg) is the Welsh-language edition of Wikipedia. This edition was started in July 2003. On 23 June 2007, it reached 10,000 articles, the 66th Wikipedia to do so. On 20 November 2008, it attained 20,000 articles. Less than a year later, on 28 October 2009, it reached 25,000 articles. In July 2013 it reached 50,000 articles and is now the 41st largest Wikipedia edition.[1] It is the only internet resource of its kind in Welsh and has an average of 2.7 million hits every month, making it the most popular Welsh language website. It, therefore, has an important place in Welsh language online culture.
Screenshot | |
Type of site | Internet encyclopedia project |
---|---|
Available in | Welsh |
Headquarters | Miami, Florida |
Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
URL | cy.wikipedia.org |
Commercial | No |
Registration | Optional |
It has been referred to in the Welsh-language current affairs magazine Golwg[2] and Y Faner Newydd, and is listed by the National Library of Wales as a Welsh-language e-resource.[3]
In an August 2007 interview, Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, used the Welsh Wikipedia as an example of the rationale for having Wikipedias in smaller languages:
Certainly within Wikipedia right now we are seeing some fairly successful projects in small European languages. You don't really need a Welsh language Wikipedia, perhaps. The number of people who speak Welsh who don't also speak English is very small and getting smaller every year. So why do we have a Welsh Wikipedia? Well, people wanted it, so they're making it. And language preservation is the main motive. It is their mother tongue and they want to keep it alive, keep its literature alive. Certainly, some of the larger small languages like Basque and Catalan have very successful projects. I definitely see that preserving parts of your language and culture through collaborative projects makes a lot of sense.[4]
A direct link to the Welsh Wikipedia has been added to the Getting Started page of the Welsh-language version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser where it appears as the first of four recommended websites, above the National Library of Wales.[5]
In September 2012 "Wici Cymru" was formed; this is a society whose aim is to develop Wikipedia in Wales. By October, BAFTA-winning actor Rhys Ifans had become its Patron.[6]
In 2019, the Welsh Wikipedia was cited as one of the reasons for improvements in the handling of Welsh in Google Translate, by providing a large corpus of machine-readable Welsh text.[7]
Number of user accounts | Number of articles | Number of files | Number of administrators |
---|---|---|---|
84,366 | 279,412 | 11,326 | 16 |
References
- List of Wikipedias on Meta-Wiki.
- Jac Codi Baw, "Wiki-peidio", Golwg, October 16, 2008, p. 30
- National Library of Wales
- "巷に溢れ出す風俗たち". geekillustrated.com. Archived from the original on July 20, 2008.
- Cychwyn Arni, Mozilla Firefox (Welsh).
- "University honours for ex-Swans star Guillermo Bauza and actor Rhys Ifans", South Wales Evening Post, 20 July 2015. Accessed 12 February 2016 Archived 25 July 2015 at the Wayback Machine
- Stephen Harrison (Aug 7, 2019). "Welsh Wikipedia Gives Me Hope". Slate.
External links
Media related to Welsh Wikipedia at Wikimedia Commons
- Statistics for Welsh Wikipedia by Erik Zachte
- Wici Cymru