The French Wikipedia is the French-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. This edition was started on 23 March 2001, and has :fr:Special:Statistics| articles as of,, making it the fifth-largest Wikipedia overall, after the English-, Cebuano-, Swedish- and German-language editions, the largest Wikipedia edition in a Romance language. It has the third-largest number of edits, and ranks among Wikipedias. It was also the third edition, after the English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia, to exceed 1 million encyclopedia articles: this occurred on 23 September 2010. In April 2016, the project had 4657 active editors who made at least five edits in that month. In 2008, the French encyclopaedia, Quid, cancelled its 2008 edition, citing falling sales on competition from the French edition of Wikipedia. , Wikipedia has an Alexa ranking of 6 and 5.06% of those visits are to the French-language edition. As of , there are users, admins and files on the French Wikipedia. On 2 December 2014, the French-language Wikipedia encyclopedia became the 3rd linguistic edition by number of registered users since its creation, overtaking for the first time the German edition, with registered users, behind the English and Spanish language editions. According to a 2013 study by the Oxford Internet Institute, Ségolène Royal and unidentified flying object were the most controversial articles on the French Wikipedia.
Statistics
The audience measurement company Médiamétrie questioned a sample of 8,500 users residing in France with access to Internet at home or at their place of work. Médiamétrie found that in June 2007, French Wikipedia had: 7,910,000 unique visitors that visited the site at least once during the month of June 2007 ; 2.7 visits per visitor during the period ; had held the 12th position in "the Top 30 most visited sites in France, excluding Internet applications," according to the criterion of the number of unique visitors and 12th position in "the Top 30 most visited sites in France, including Internet applications," like eMule or Real Networks. By August 2011, French Wikipedia was the 7th most visited site in France, with nearly 16 million unique visitors a month. In April 2012, it had 20 million unique visitors per month, or 2.4 million per day with over 700 million page views. For the majority of the external links referenced in the articles, a program running on French Wikipedia automatically generates a link titled, which is the union of two parts: the first one starts with http://archive.kiwix.com/cache/?url=, and the second is derived from the referenced URL. Even if the referenced external link is readable, the one generated can't be accessed any more. Nonetheless, this feature seems to be created for the long-term digital preservation of the external references. In 2019 the French Wikipedia has 425 thousand unique categories. The average article in this language version has 18 categories, while number of unique categories per articles ratio is 0.203. The largest number of articles has Society and Geography category. In French Wikipedia articles related to Crime and Events has the highest average quality. Content about Crime is read more often and has the highest authors' interest on average. In March 2020 the French Wikipedia contained 12.4 million references, wherein 1.32% of them had the DOI identifier and 7.7% of references contained the ISBN number. Total share of articles on the French Wikipedia with at least one reference was 59.03%. At the time it had 14.41% and 0.56% of articles with at least 10 and 100 references respectively.
