Welsh Wikipedia

Welsh Wikipedia

URL	cy.wikipedia.org
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Internet encyclopedia project
Registration	Optional
Available language(s)	Welsh
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation

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. It currently has over 34,000 articles and is now the 59th largest Wikipedia edition (November 2011).^[1] It is the only internet resource of its kind in Welsh, and therefore has an important place in Welsh language on-line 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 ^[2] and Y Faner Newydd, and is listed by the National Library of Wales as a Welsh-language e-resource.^[3]

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."^[4]

Recently 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.^[5] In April 2009 a direct link to the Welsh Wikipedia was added to the website Cymraeg ar y We ('Welsh on the Web'), which lists websites with at least one page entirely in Welsh.^[6]

References

1. ^ List of Wikipedias on Meta-Wiki.
2. ^ Jac Codi Baw, "Wiki-peidio", Golwg, October 16, 2008, p. 30
3. ^ National Library of Wales
4. ^ Interview on geekillustrated.com, August 2007
5. ^ Cychwyn Arni, Mozilla Firefox (Welsh).
6. ^ Cymraeg ar y We

External links

• Statistics for Welsh Wikipedia by Erik Zachte