French Wikipedia

This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (January 2021) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the French article. Machine translation like DeepL or Google Translate is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 4,470 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Wikipédia en français]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|fr|Wikipédia en français}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

French Wikipedia

Screenshot Main Page of the French Wikipedia in July 2019
Type of site	Online encyclopedia
Available in	French
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
URL	fr.wikipedia.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional
Launched	23 March 2001; 20 years ago (2001-03-23)

The French Wikipedia (French: Wikipédia en français) is the French-language edition of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. This edition was started on 23 March 2001, two months after the official creation of Wikipedia.^[1] It has 2,385,383 articles as of 30 December, 2021, making it the fifth-largest Wikipedia overall, after the English-, Cebuano-, Swedish- and German-language editions, the largest Wikipedia edition in a Romance language. It has the third-most edits, and ranks 6th in terms of depth among Wikipedias. 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 April 2016, the project had 4657 active editors who made at least five edits in that month.

In 2008, the French encyclopaedia Quid cancelled its 2008 edition, citing falling sales on competition from the French edition of Wikipedia.^[2]

As of December 2021, there are 4,266,000 users, 159 admins and 66,600 files on the French Wikipedia.^[3]

On 2 December 2014, the French-language Wikipedia encyclopedia became the 3rd^[4] linguistic edition by number of registered users since its creation, overtaking for the first time the German edition, with 2,022,504 registered users,^[5][6] behind the English (23,300,456)^[7] and Spanish (3,401,493)^[8] language editions.

According to a 2013 study by Taha Yasseri et al., from Oxford Internet Institute, Ségolène Royal (FR) and unidentified flying object (objet volant non identifié) were the most controversial articles on the French Wikipedia.^[9]

Statistics[]

The countries in which the French Wikipedia is the most popular language version of Wikipedia are shown in dark blue.

Page views by country over time on the French Wikipedia.

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^[10] with over 700 million page views.^[11]

For the majority of the external links referenced in the articles, a program running on French Wikipedia automatically generates a link titled [archive], which is the union of two parts: the first one starts with http://archive.kiwix.com/cache/?url=,^[12] and the second is derived from the referenced URL.^[13] This feature has been created for the long-term digital preservation of the external references (so that the archive stay accessible even if the original reference is deleted).

References[]

External links[]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to French Wikipedia.

• French Wikipedia website (mobile version)