The English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Founded on 15 January 2001 and reaching four million articles by July 2012, it was the first edition of Wikipedia and remains the largest, with almost three times as many articles as the next largest, the German Wikipedia. As of May 2013, nearly 15.9% of articles in all Wikipedias belong to the English language edition. This share has gradually declined from more than 50% in 2003, due to the growth of Wikipedias in other languages. There are 4,238,036 articles on the site (live count). In January 2012, the combined text of the English Wikipedia's articles totalled approximately 9.7 gigabytes.
The Simple English Wikipedia is a variation, with most of the articles using a simplified level of English vocabulary. There are also two other "English" Wikipedias, the Scots Wikipedia (Scots Wikipaedia) which aims to preserve the vocabulary and grammar of the Scots language in all its forms over the past nine centuries, and the Old English (Aenglisc/Anglo-Saxon) Wikipedia, although the latter is largely unintelligible to a native English speaker.
The English Wikipedia was the first Wikipedia edition and has remained the largest. It has pioneered many ideas as conventions, policies or features which were later adopted by some of the other-language Wikipedia editions. These ideas include "featured articles", the neutral-point-of-view policy, navigation templates, the sorting of short "stub" articles into sub-categories, dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration, and weekly collaborations.
The English Wikipedia has adopted features from the German Wikipedia, and from smaller editions. These features include verified revisions from the German Wikipedia (dewiki), and town population-lookup templates from the Dutch Wikipedia (nlwiki).
