Wikipedia is celebrating . The world's busiest free encyclopedia will celebrate its tenth birthday tomorrow, Saturday , January 15 . With ten years of life, Wikipedia has managed to have 278 editions in different languages and some 17 and a half million entries . Such magnificent figures join the latest news that the Wikimedia Foundation has celebrated in a particular way. And it is that Jimmy Wales , the founder of the encyclopedia, has managed to raise a whopping 16 million dollars in his donation campaign. Some 12.3 million euros that Internet users have sent to support the development of Wikipedia .
There are enough reasons to be happy about everything that happened. Among the 278 editions in different languages, we must recognize the edition in Spanish , since it is close to 700,000 current articles and is the fourth most visited. The truth is that we have some luxury publishers : 225 who stand out for being especially active . In fact, according to the statistics provided by Wikipedia , Spaniards write about 400 articles every day, with approximately ten editions per day and editor. The bad thing is that the female sex has not yet been released: Most editors are still men.
In fact, María Sefidari , vice president of the Spanish chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation , has revealed that many women stop collaborating due to some conflicts between editors. Added to this problem is another important issue: the fact that Wikipedia has not accepted the construction of a chapter in Catalan because it is classified by states and not by languages . It should be remembered at this point that the edition of Wikipedia in Catalan already has more than 300,000 articles and is the second oldest in the world.
The problem is not unique. In Belgium and Switzerland , multilingual states, the controversy has also had its reason for being . There is no doubt that the open encyclopedia should be open to all questions, including language as a vehicle of communication and not to political or state questions.
In any case, Wikipedia registers up to 410 million unique visitors per month , making it the fifth most visited site on the planet. A figure that positions this page as one of the most relevant on the Internet . And that is one of the few that does not incorporate advertising .
Photo by: Phae