French Wikipedia

French Wikipedia

Screenshot
Web address	fr.wikipedia.org
Commercial	No
Type of site	Internet encyclopedia project
Registration	Optional
Available in	French
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Launched	23 March 2001

The French Wikipedia (French: Wikipédia francophone, Wikipédia en français) is the French-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. This edition was started in March 2001, and has 1,751,242 articles as of May 1, 2016, making it the fifth-largest Wikipedia overall, after the English-, Dutch-, German-, Swedish- and Cebuano-language editions, the largest Wikipedia edition in a Romance language, and the second-largest Wikipedia in any non-Germanic language. It has the third-largest number of edits. It was also the third edition, after the English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia, to exceed 1 million encyclopedia articles: this occurred on 23 September 2010.^[1] In 2008, the French encyclopaedia, Quid, canceled its 2008 edition, citing falling sales on competition from the French edition of Wikipedia.^[2]

As of June 2014, Wikipedia has an Alexa ranking of 6 and 5.06% of those visits are to the French-language edition.^[3] As of May 2016, there are 2,509,000 users, 166 admins and 49,353 files on the French Wikipedia.^[4]

On December 2, 2014, the French-language Wikipedia encyclopedia became the 3rd^[5] linguistic edition by number of registered users since its creation, overtaking for the first time the German edition, with 2,022,504 registered users,^[6][7] behind the English (23,300,456)^[8] and Spanish (3,401,493)^[9] language editions.

According to a 2013 study by the Oxford Internet Institute, Ségolène Royal (FR) and unidentified flying object (objet volant non identifié) were the most controversial articles on the French Wikipedia.^[10]

Statistics

Origin of edits (2014/01 - 2014/03) Source France    71.7% Canada    6.4% Belgium    6.1% Unknown    3.9% Algeria    1.6% Switzerland    1.5% United Kingdom    1.1% Spain    0.8% United States    0.7% Morocco    0.7% Tunisia    0.6% Germany    0.6% Other    4.3%

The countries in which the French Wikipedia is the most popular language version of Wikipedia are shown in dark blue. Countries where the French Wikipedia ranks second are in light blue.^[11]

The audience measurement company Médiamétrie questioned a sample of 8,500 users residing in France with access to Internet 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^[12] with over 700 million page views.^[13]

References

1. "Wikipédia en français dépasse le million d'articles". ZDNet France.
2. Litchfield, John. "France's favourite encyclopaedia falls victim to Wikipedia." The Independent. Wednesday 20 February 2008. Retrieved on 26 June 2013.
3. "Wikipedia.org Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-04-01.
4. "Wikipedia Statistics - Tables - French". wikimedia.org.
5. "List of Wikipedias by edits per article". wikimedia.org.
6. fr:Spécial:Statistiques
7. de:Spezial:Statistik
8. en:Special:Statistics?action=raw
9. "Estadísticas". es.wikipedia.org.
10. Taha Yasseri, Anselm Spoerri, Mark Graham, János Kertész (8 Jul 2013). "The most controversial topics in Wikipedia: A multilingual and geographical analysis". arXiv:1305.5566v2.
11. Erik Zachte (14 November 2011). "Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report - Wikipedia Page Views Per Country - Trends". Wikimedia Statistics. Retrieved 19 January 2011.
12. "Wikipédia dépasse 20 millions de visiteurs/mois en France (Médiamétrie)". ZDNet. 31 May 2012. Retrieved 2014-09-04.
13. "French Wikipedia at a glance". stats.wikimedia.org. Archived from the original on 2012-05-30.

External links

• French Wikipedia website (mobile version)