Available in Welsh Owner Wikimedia Foundation Commercial No | Headquarters Miami, Florida Website cy.wikipedia.org | |
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Type of site Internet encyclopedia project | ||
The Welsh Wikipedia (Welsh: Wicipedia Cymraeg or plain Wicipedia) is the Welsh-language edition of Wikipedia. This edition was started in July 2003. On 23 June 2007 it reached 10,000 articles, the 66th Wikipedia to do so. On 20 November 2008 it attained 20,000 articles. Less than a year later, on 28 October 2009, it reached 25,000 articles. In July 2013 it reached 50,000 articles and is now the 62nd largest Wikipedia edition. It is the only internet resource of its kind in Welsh, has an average of 2.7 million hits every month making it the most popular Welsh language website; it therefore has an important place in Welsh language online culture.
The Welsh Wikipedia has been growing at a considerable rate, for its size, over the last few years, with over 10,000 articles created in less than 18 months in the period June 2007 – November 2008, doubling its total. It has been referred to in the Welsh-language current affairs magazine Golwg and Y Faner Newydd, and is listed by the National Library of Wales as a Welsh-language e-resource.
In an August 2007 interview, Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, used the Welsh Wikipedia as an example of the rationale for having Wikipedias in smaller languages:
Certainly within Wikipedia right now we are seeing some fairly successful projects in small European languages. You don't really need a Welsh language Wikipedia, perhaps. The number of people who speak Welsh who don't also speak English is very small and getting smaller every year. So why do we have a Welsh Wikipedia? Well, people wanted it, so they're making it. And language preservation is the main motive. It is their mother tongue and they want to keep it alive, keep its literature alive. Certainly some of the larger small languages like Basque and Catalan have very successful projects. I definitely see that preserving parts of your language and culture through collaborative projects makes a lot of sense.
A direct link to the Welsh Wikipedia has been added to the Getting Started page of the Welsh-language version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser where it appears as the first of four recommended websites, above the National Library of Wales.
In September 2012 "Wici Cymru" was formed; this is a society whose aim is to develop Wikipedia in Wales. By October, BAFTA-winning actor Rhys Ifans had become its Patron.