French Wikipedia

This page is a descriptive article on the French Wikipedia, feel free to add any content.

Facts

Started: March 2001

Current size: 2,317,545 articles

Total edits: 181,320,564

Active editors: 21,668 in the past month

Areas of strength :

• Number of articles
• Quality of articles on particular topics (Ancient Greece)

Areas of weakness :

• General quality of articles
• Strength of community
• Contributors origin : very few contributors from French-speaking countries outside France/Quebec/Switzerland/Belgium (very few Africans except a few Tunisians).

What other prominent encyclopedias exist in this language (print, electronic, online)?

• (French) Encarta
• (French) Encyclopædia Britannica
• (French) Encyclopædia Universalis
• (French) Encyclopédie Hachette Multimédia
• (French) Encyclopédie contributive Larousse

Prominent milestones/events

• TK

What has its impact been?

• TK

Features

What language features are challenging?

• Diacritics usage in text
• Punctuation usage in wikilinks
• French quotes for citations
• Applying rules to document titles (write Le Petit Prince, not Le petit prince for instance)

What would surprise the outside reader about the community?

• TK

What are some unique practices/characteristics?

• TK

Who were the earliest participants, who started it?

• TK

Other prominent Wikipedians?

• Anthere, President of the Wikimedia Foundation

Statistics

First test made by Toira on 25/02/07

Using alt-shift-x (to display a random page) 30 times I got:

• 09 articles with decent content. [30%]
• 12 stub or stub-alike article (3 lines on average).
• 06 bot generated articles (towns). [20%]
• 03 list pages. [10%]

Fork fears

• Fork threats for localised logo controversy.
• Fork fears by someone for some discussions with Jumbo about the role of the Wikimedia Foundation.