The French Wikipedia (french: Wikipédia en français) is the
French-language edition of
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
, the free
online encyclopedia
An online encyclopedia, also called an Internet encyclopedia, or a digital encyclopedia, is an encyclopedia accessible through the internet. Examples include Wikipedia and ''Encyclopædia Britannica''.
Digitization of old content
In January 199 ...
. This edition was started on 23 March 2001, two months after the official creation of Wikipedia.
It has
articles as of , making it the -largest Wikipedia overall, after the
English-,
Cebuano-,
Swedish
Swedish or ' may refer to:
Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically:
* Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland
** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
- and
German-language editions, the largest Wikipedia edition in a
Romance language
The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language f ...
. It has the third-most edits, and ranks
6th in terms of depth among Wikipedias. It was also 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 4657 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 encyclopedia became the 3rd linguistic edition by number of registered users since its creation, overtaking for the first time the German edition, with registered users, behind the English () and Spanish () language editions.
According to a 2013 study by
Taha Yasseri et al., from
Oxford Internet Institute,
Ségolène Royal
Marie-Ségolène Royal (; born 22 September 1953) is a French politician who was the Socialist Party candidate for the Presidency of France in the 2007 election.
Royal was president of the Poitou-Charentes Regional Council from 2004 to 201 ...
(
FR) and
unidentified flying object (
objet volant non identifié) were the most controversial articles on the French Wikipedia.
Statistics
The audience measurement company
Médiamétrie questioned a
sample of 8,500 users residing in France with access to
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
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 (compared to 4,355,000 unique visitors in June 2006); 2.7 visits per visitor during the period (2.0 visits in June 2006); had held the 12th position (21st in 2006) 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 (22nd position in June 2006).
By August 2011, French Wikipedia was the 7th most visited site in France, with nearly 16 million unique visitors a month (according to Médiamétrie). In April 2012, it had 20 million unique visitors per month, or 2.4 million per day with over 700 million page views.
For the majority of the external links referenced in the articles, a program running on French Wikipedia automatically generates a
link titled ''
rchive/nowiki>'', which is the union of two parts: the first one starts with ''http://archive.kiwix.com/cache/?url='', and the second is derived from the referenced URL.[e.g. in the article of the President François Mitterrand, reference n. 1 contains the link ''http://www.mitterrand.org/Lieux-de-recueillement-et-de.html'', for which the French Wikipedia has generated the link ''http://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/20200814221716/http://www.mitterrand.org/Lieux-de-recueillement-et-de.html''.] This feature has been created for the long-term digital preservation
In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal endeavor to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. It involves planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and ...
of the external references (so that the archive stays accessible even if the original reference is deleted).
References
External links
French Wikipedia website
mobile version
{{Portal bar, Internet
Wikipedias by language
Internet properties established in 2001
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
French encyclopedias
Wikipedias in Romance languages