Type of site Internet encyclopedia Slogan(s) L'enciclopèdia lliure Commercial No | Owner Wikimedia Foundation Website ca.wikipedia.org Registration Optional | |
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The Catalan Wikipedia (Catalan: Viquipèdia en català) is the Catalan-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It was created on 16 March 2001, just a few minutes after the first non-English Wikipedia, the German edition. With about 536,000 articles, it is currently the 17th-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles, and the fifth-largest Wikipedia in a Romance language. In April 2016, the project had 582 active editors who made at least five edits in that month. The edition is most notable for its large number of quality articles, which illustrates the Catalan language's important online presence despite being a minority language.
Creation
On March 16, 2001, Jimmy Wales announced that he wanted to create Wikipedias in other languages and mentioned that there was interest in creating a Catalan version. The first tests were made on the deutsche.wikipedia.com, and a few minutes later, the Catalan Wikipedia was created in the catalan.wikipedia.com domain.
The first edit on a non-English Wikipedia was at 21:07 UTC, March 16, 2001, made to the Catalan Main Page. The first contribution in a non-English article dates from March 17 at 01:41 UTC in the article Àbac. Despite being created after the German Wikipedia, for about two months it was the only non-English Wikipedia that contained articles.
After some time, the domain changed to ca.wikipedia.com and later to ca.wikipedia.org. About 2003 its community started to use the name "Viquipèdia" when talking about this edition of Wikipedia. Nowadays this word is used in Catalan language to refer the whole Wikipedia. About 2005 the domain www.viquipedia.net was registered and it redirects to ca.wikipedia.org. In 2007 www.viquipedia.cat was also registered and redirected.
The first registered user was probably AstroNomer, presumably used only to make some registration tests, but the first registered user to make lasting contributions was Cdani, the same user cited in Jimbo Wales' message.
In 2005 the Catalan Wikipedia community debated on which name(s) of the Catalan language to present in the main page and other policy pages, either català, "Catalan", valencià, "Valencian", or a combination of both català-valencià and català o valencià. Although there was not a consensus on any of the proposals, users agreed that in articles relevant to the Valencian Community, the name "Valencian" was to be used; on all other articles "Catalan" is preferred. The main page avoids making reference to a particular nomenclature, by simply stating aquesta versió, "this version".