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Most popular edition of Wikipedia by country as of December 2022. In grayed-out countries, a local language edition is usually the most popular. Wikipedia is a free multilingual wiki-based open-source online encyclopedia edited and maintained by a community of volunteer editors, started on 15 January 2001 as an English-language encyclopedia. Non-English editions followed in the same year: the German and Catalan editions were created on 16 March, the French edition was created on 23 March, and the Swedish edition was created on 23 May. As of June 2026, Wikipedia articles have been created in 361 editions, with 345 currently active, 16 closed and 11 moved to Wikimedia Incubator.
The Meta-Wiki language committee manages policies on creating new Wikimedia projects. To be eligible, a language must have a valid ISO 639 code, be "sufficiently unique", and have a "sufficient number of fluent users".