English Wikipedia
English-language edition of Wikipedia From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The English Wikipedia is the English language edition of the Wikipedia. English is the first language in which Wikipedia was written. It was started on 15 January 2001. It is the largest encyclopedia in the world, and the largest version of Wikipedia since April 2019.[1] It has 7,040,517 articles as of 16 August 2025.[2] In October 2015, the total volume of the compressed texts of the English Wikipedia's articles added up to 23.2 gigabytes.[source?]
The Simple English Wikipedia is a variation in which most of the articles use only basic English vocabulary (simplewiki). There is also the Old English (Ænglisc/Anglo-Saxon) Wikipedia (angwiki).
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Comparisons with other Wikipedia sites
Wikipedia sites in other languages have imitated some of its technical and organizational features. It has a newsletter called The Signpost. As the English Wikipedia is very popular, there can be many people editing the Wikipedia in one minute. This made recent changes less effective for understanding changes. Instead, editors can select and watch for changes in particular articles, using the Watchlist feature of MediaWiki.[source?]
Both Watchlist and Recent changes can be filtered to show particular kinds of edits, such as edits from IP addresses or edits with signs of vandalism. Some editors use special software to detect and fix vandalism.[3][4]
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Controversies
Some believe that the English Wikipedia shows significant bias and unfairness.[5] Editors of reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned Wikipedia's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[6]
Gender bias
An example of bias is that around 90% of Wikipedia editors are male, mostly White.[7] Others think that Wikipedia is more useful than other encyclopedias because it is large and can be updated quickly.[source?] In 2010, the logo of the English Wikipedia like most Wikipedia's was slightly changed. However, some Wikipedias, like the Simple English Wikipedia, still kept the old logo.
The English Wikipedia, as one of the most visited websites worldwide,[8] has been criticized for repeated occurrences of on-site antisemitism.[9][10]
Whitewashing of Nazi war criminals
The English Wikipedia was criticized for condoning the systematic whitewashing of Nazi war criminals on the platform.[11] For instance, Arthur Nebe (a senior SS official who invented mobile gas chambers to kill Jews) was portrayed as a savior of Jews by users who distorted a cited source that actually said the opposite.[11] SS units responsible for the Holocaust were either depicted as brave fighters or described in passive voice to make their atrocities look normal.[11]
Those who corrected the false content had also faced persistent harassment from pro-Nazi users, some of whom were found to have repeatedly cited materials from Holocaust-denying sources (e.g. Journal of Historical Review, Nation Europa and Franz Kurowski[11]), misrepresented them as academic consensus and gamed the rules to prevent them from being corrected.[11] The violations continued for years with limited administrative intervention,[11] which promoted Nazi sympathy among young readers and hurt efforts to preserve the historical truth.[11] German military historian Jens Westemeier commented on the issue,[11]
The English Wikipedia pages are far more sympathetic towards the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS than the German ones [. ...] Wikipedia and Amazon are the worst distributors of pro-Nazi perspectives and the ["clean"] Wehrmacht myth.
Holocaust distortion
In 2023, Holocaust historians Prof. Jan Grabowski and Dr. Shira Klein published a 57-page article titled Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust[12] in The Journal of Holocaust Research in which they said to have found widespread distortion of Poland's Holocaust history,[10][12] which involved the exaggeration[10][12] of Jewish collaboration with Nazi/Soviet occupiers, invention of Jewish "war crimes" against Poles,[10][12] downplaying of Polish collaboration with Nazi/Soviet occupiers and blaming Jews for their own suffering:[10][12]
Four distortions dominate Wikipedia’s coverage of Polish–Jewish wartime history: a false equivalence narrative suggesting that Poles and Jews suffered equally in World War II; a false innocence narrative, arguing that Polish antisemitism was marginal, while the Poles’ role in saving Jews was monumental; antisemitic tropes insinuating that most Jews supported Communism and conspired with Communists to betray Poles (Żydokomuna or Judeo–Bolshevism), that money-hungry Jews controlled or still control Poland, and that Jews bear responsibility for their own persecution.
Grabowski and Klein also criticized English Wikipedia's administrators and accused the Wikimedia Foundation of lacking the will to handle:[10][12]
Wikipedia’s administrators have largely failed to uphold Wikipedia’s policies [. ...] unable to deal with the issue of persistent distortion [...] Wikipedia’s articles [...] have become a hub of misinformation and antisemitic canards.
On another occasion, Prof. Grabowski said,[10]
As a historian, I was aware [...] of various distortions [...] of the Holocaust on Wikipedia. What I found shocking, was the sheer scale [...] and the small number of individuals needed to distort the history of one of the greatest tragedies in the history of humanity.
Distortion of Jewish history
In 2024, independent journalist investigations uncovered a large-scale off-site canvassing campaign to rewrite Jewish history and reshape the narrative surrounding the Israel–Palestine conflict, which involved 40 accounts having made at least 2,000,000 edits to over 10,000 Jewish-related articles.[13]
The off-site canvassing campaign was coordinated by an 8,000-member Tech for Palestine Discord channel,[13] where the organizers provided the participants in-depth training (e.g. strategy planning sessions, group audio "office hour" chats)[13] on getting used to Wikipedia's site operation,[13] assigning participants (in groups of 2~3) to edit hundreds of articles in rotation,[13] and gaming the rules to block others from correcting them.[13]
On 12 December 2024, English Wikipedia's arbitration committee announced that two editors[14] had been site-banned indefinitely for off-site canvassing[13][14] and "encouraging other users to game the extended confirmed restriction and engage in disruptive editing."[14] Another three editors have also been sanctioned for similar reasons.[14] On January 17, 2025, English Wikipedia's arbitration committee further voted to impose indefinite topic-bans on multiple longtime editors associated with the organized campaign.[15] ADL's CEO Jonathan Greenblatt commented,[15]
[I]t is now imperative for Wikipedia to [...] undo the harm caused by these rogue but prolific editors who [...] wreaked havoc across the platform [. ...] a systemic problem [...] that needs immediate action.
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Related pages
References
Other websites
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