Born in March 2001, the French version of Wikipedia has just crossed the symbolic threshold of two million articles. These two million articles, divided into more than 1,000 thematic portals, represent nearly 150 million modifications made by thousands of Internet users.
Wikipedia in French started in March 2001 (two months after the English version), and in September 2010, the free encyclopedia passed the one million article mark. It was then the third to reach this milestone, after the English version (March 2006) and the German version (December 2009).
The first million articles were reached on September 21, 2010.
The French version has just passed the 2 million articles mark this week: it is enriched by 300 to 400 new articles per day on a multitude of subjects.
This increase in content is the result of the volunteer work of approximately 19,000 active registered contributors each month and tens of thousands of anonymous (i.e., not having a user account) contributors.
Known as Wikipedians, these editors come from all age groups (active, but also high school students and retirees) and come from the French-speaking world as a whole: France, Quebec, Switzerland, Belgium, Tunisia, Ivory Coast etc.
In April 2018, according to Mediamétrie/Netratings, Wikipedia was the fourth most visited site by French Internet users (with 29.5 million unique visitors per month, nearly 3.7 million per day), behind Google, Facebook and YouTube.
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