Simple English Wikipedia

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The main page of the Simple English Wikipedia
URLsimple.wikipedia.org
Commercial?No
Type of siteInternet encyclopedia project
RegistrationOptional
Available language(s)English
OwnerWikimedia Foundation
LaunchedNovember 17, 2003; 15 years ago (2003-11-17)

The Simple English Wikipedia is an English-language version of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, that is written at a basic level of English.[1] It was created on November 17, 2003. All of the articles in the Simple English Wikipedia need to use shorter sentences and easier words and grammar than the regular English Wikipedia.

People with different needs use the Simple English Wikipedia. They include:

Other people use the Simple English Wikipedia because the basic language helps them understand hard ideas or topics they do not know about.

Many articles are shorter than the same articles in the English Wikipedia.[2] Technical subjects use some terms which are not simple. Editors try to explain these terms in a simple way. This makes Simple English articles a good way to understand difficult articles from the ordinary English Wikipedia. If someone cannot understand an idea in complex English, they can read the Simple English article.

When the Simple English Wikipedia began in 2003, the ordinary English Wikipedia already had 150,000 articles, and seven other Wikipedias in other languages had over 15,000 articles. Since the other Wikipedias already have so many articles, most Simple English articles take articles from other Wikipedias and make them simple; they are usually not new articles. Right now, the Simple English Wikipedia has 142,714 articles. In October of 2017, it was the 51st largest Wikipedia.[3]

Related pages[change | change source]

References[change | change source]

  1. Tim Dowling (January 14, 2008). "Wikipedia too long-winded for you? Try the simple version". The Guardian. Retrieved 2009-05-17.
  2. Koen Smets; et al. "Automatic Vandalism Detection in Wikipedia: Towards a Machine Learning Approach" (PDF). University of Antwerp. Retrieved 2009-05-17.CS1 maint: Explicit use of et al. (link)
  3. Wikimedia list of Wikipedias and their statistics Retrieved 21 October 2017.

Other websites[change | change source]