The Welsh Wikipedia () is the

Welsh-language Welsh ( or ) is a Celtic language of the Brittonic subgroup that is native to the Welsh people. Welsh is spoken natively in Wales by about 18% of the population, by some in England, and in (the Welsh colony in Chubut Province, Argentina). ...

edition of

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...

. 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 largest Wikipedia edition. 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. It has been referred to in the Welsh-language current affairs magazine '' Golwg'' and ''Y Faner Newydd'', and is listed by the

National Library of Wales The National Library of Wales (, ) in Aberystwyth is the national legal deposit library of Wales and is one of the Welsh Government sponsored bodies. It is the biggest library in Wales, holding over 6.5 million books and periodicals, and the l ...

as a Welsh-language e-resource. In an August 2007 interview,

Jimmy Wales Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known as Jimbo Wales, is an American List of Internet entrepreneurs, Internet entrepreneur and former Trader (finance), financial trader. He is a Founders of Wikipedia, co-founder of the non-profi ...

, co-founder of Wikipedia, used the Welsh Wikipedia as an example of the rationale for having Wikipedias in smaller languages: A direct link to the Welsh Wikipedia has been added to the Getting Started page of the Welsh-language version of the

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curren ...

web browser where it appears as the first of four recommended websites, above the

. In September 2012 "Wici Cymru" was formed; this is a society whose aim is to develop Wikipedia in Wales. By October, actor

Rhys Ifans Rhys Owain Evans (; born 22 July 1967), known as Rhys Ifans, is a Welsh actor. He has portrayed roles in ''Notting Hill'' (1999), '' Kevin & Perry Go Large'' (2000), and '' Enduring Love'' (2004), in addition to Xenophilius Lovegood in ''Harry ...

had become its Patron. In 2013, it was stated translations of

English Wikipedia The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition. English Wikipedia is hosted alongside o ...

were not allowed on the site and instead most articles are written from scratch. In 2019, the Welsh Wikipedia was cited as one of the reasons for improvements in the handling of Welsh in

Google Translate Google Translate is a multilingualism, multilingual neural machine translation, neural machine translation service developed by Google to translation, translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a web applic ...

, by providing a large corpus of machine-readable Welsh text. In the same 2019 source, it was stated that the Welsh Wikipedia represents the ideological opinions of its community, it was claimed to be more supportive of

separatism Separatism is the advocacy of cultural, ethnic, tribal, religious, racial, regional, governmental, or gender separation from the larger group. As with secession, separatism conventionally refers to full political separation. Groups simply seekin ...

, for example it classes

Catalonia Catalonia is an autonomous community of Spain, designated as a ''nationalities and regions of Spain, nationality'' by its Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia of 2006, Statute of Autonomy. Most of its territory (except the Val d'Aran) is situate ...

as a

country A country is a distinct part of the world, such as a state, nation, or other political entity. When referring to a specific polity, the term "country" may refer to a sovereign state, state with limited recognition, constituent country, ...

following its 2017 declaration, compared to English Wikipedia which still classes it as an "

autonomous community The autonomous communities () are the first-level administrative divisions of Spain, created in accordance with the Spanish Constitution of 1978, with the aim of guaranteeing limited autonomy to the nationalities and regions that make up Sp ...

". Comparisons of the article

Game of Thrones ''Game of Thrones'' is an American Fantasy television, fantasy Drama (film and television), drama television series created by David Benioff and for HBO. It is an adaptation of ''A Song of Ice and Fire'', a series of high fantasy novels by ...

, noted the more Welsh pride present on its Welsh version of the TV show. Many of the site's editors are children learning Welsh as part of bilingual school education programmes, with many of the IP addresses banned on the site belonging to schools. However, when the site's managers visit schools and educate how to contribute to the site, the ban is usually lifted. The site uses

Wikidata Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, are able to use under the CC0 public domain ...

to develop a common source of structured data for the site. Most of Welsh Wikipedia editors are men, like English Wikipedia, however, the Welsh-language site has a smaller

gender bias Gender bias is the tendency to prefer one gender over another. It is a form of unconscious bias, or implicit bias, which occurs when one individual unconsciously attributes certain attitudes and stereotypes to another person or group of people ...

than English Wikipedia, with the Welsh site having a roughly 50/50 split on male/female

biographies A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events. Unlike a profile or curri ...

compared to less than 20% on English Wikipedia, at the time in 2019. In 2023, the site was credited with assisting the creation of a pronunciation map for Welsh place-names in the Welsh-language.

References

External links

Statistics for Welsh Wikipedia
by Erik Zachte * Wici Cymru {{Authority control

Wikipedias in Celtic languages

Internet properties established in 2003

See also

References

External links