Polish Wikipedia celebrated its 20th birthday on Sunday. The local version of the free online encyclopaedia has more than 4,600 editors and their numbers have recently been growing at a record pace amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The Polish-language version of the website appeared in 2001, a few months after the English original. Its first entry was on the Titius-Bode law on planet spacing in the solar system, perhaps reflecting the interests of one of its founders, Paweł Jochym, a physicist (the other was Krzysztof Jasiutowicz, a doctor).
It now contains almost 1.5 million articles, the 10th most of any language, just below Spanish and Italian (both 1.7 million) but above Japanese (1.3 million) and Chinese (1.2 million). The English-language Wikipedia, which is the largest of all versions, contains almost 6.4 million articles.
Number of Polish-language articles on Wikimedia every September since founding in 2001. Source: Wikipedia
Wikipedia is among the 10 most visited websites in Poland, with 30 million users every month, reports the Polish Press Agency (PAP). The Polish version is visited by 81.7% of internet users in Poland.
According to Nina Gabryś, spokeswoman of the Wikimedia Polska Association, more than 4,600 editors oversee Wikipedia’s Polish articles, as well as sister projects Wiktionary and Wikisource.
The number of active editors has been growing since 2016 and has this year achieved the highest increase in years, says Natalia Szafran-Kozakowska, a Wikimedia Polska community support specialist.
“The average monthly number of people actively editing Wikipedia has increased by over 6%,” she said, quoted by PAP. This has been in part caused by the coronavirus pandemic, as more people were stuck at home during lockdowns.
The Polish site was initially an independent project called the Polish Free Network Encyclopedia, which was hosted on wiki.rozeta.com.pl. It merged with the larger English version of Wikipedia in January 2002 (first moving to pl.wikipedia.com and later to pl.wikipedia.org).
Main image credit: wikimedia.org (screenshot)
Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.
