Launched 15 January 2001
The English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Founded on 15 January 2001 and reaching four million articles by July 2012, it was the first edition of Wikipedia and, as of September 2014, has the most articles (more than twice as many as the next in rank, the Swedish Wikipedia).[2] As of October 2014, nearly 13.7% of articles in all Wikipedias belong to the English-language edition. This share has gradually declined from more than 50% in 2003, due to the growth of Wikipedias in other languages.[3] There are 4,629,731 articles on the site (live count).[4] In December 2012, the combined text of the English Wikipedia's articles totaled roughly 9.7 gigabytes.[5]he English Wikipedia reached 4,000,000 registered user accounts on 1 April 2007,[12] just a little over a year since it had crossed a threshold of 1,000,000 registered user accounts in late February 2006.[13]

Over 800,000 editors have edited Wikipedia more than 10 times.[14] 300,000 editors edit Wikipedia every month[citation needed]; of these, over 30,000 perform more than 5 edits per month, and a little over 3,000 perform more than 100 edits per month.[15] By 24 November 2011, a total of 500 million edits had been performed on the English Wikipedia.[citation needed]

As the largest Wikipedia edition, and because English is such a widely used language, the English Wikipedia draws many users and editors whose native language is not English.