Wikipedia English read the most

BANGALORE, INDIA: Wikipedia English has beaten other languagesin terms of the number of articles, but faces threat from other languages in terms of growth rate, which shows a negative trend.

The site has recently launched the mobile version of the page, making more people say “I can read Wikipedia”.

According to the Wikipedia statistics on multilingual ranking as of December 2009, English is the only language to reach 3 million article mark. Other languages such as German and French are joining the million bandwagon soon. The English version has a total of 3,138,116 articles, 355,619,017 users and 11,270,806 active users. Understandably, a larger chunk of people who read Wikipedia know English.

According to the same statistics, the total number of articles on Wikipedia is 14,635,028, with 21,125,164 users.

A scientist team had recently warned that the changes in the website could compromise the encyclopaedia's quality in the long term. There were also reports that many volunteers were quitting Wikipedia.

The English language hit 3,000,000 articles mark in the month of August 2009, being the highest entry in any language followed by German, which achieved 1,000,000 articles in December 2009 and French, which saw 900,000 articles uploaded by January 2010.

Among Indian languages, Telugu leads the league with reaching the milestone of 40,000 articles in May 2008, way ahead of Hindi that achieved this level in September 2009.

Bishnupriya Manipuri reached the 20,000 articles milestone in August 2007, while Marathi, Bengali and Tamil reached the same milestone in September 2008, June 2009 and November 2009 respectively.

However, looking at the growth rate, English holds 22 per cent of the share in Wikipedia, with a yearly growth rate of 26 per cent. While, a few other languages like Haitain, Ukranian, Arabic, and Russian are growing by 621, 76, 84 and 55 percent respectively.