The Kazakh Wikipedia was started in June 2002. The Kazakh Wikipedia had a very high growth rate in 2011, going from 7,000 articles to over 100,000 in less than one year, largely due to the incorporation of materials from the Kazakh Encyclopedia, which have been released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License. This rapid expansion was initiated by the non-profit Wikibilim Foundation. The Samruk Kazyna Foundation, Kazakhstan's sovereign oil wealth fund, sponsored the expansion, with 30 million tenge spent in 2011 for paid editing, digitalization, and author rights transfer. At the Wikimania 2011 conference WikiBilim president Rauan Kenzhekhanuly was awarded the Wikipedian of the Year award by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales for his work on the Kazakh Wikipedia expansion. In April 2012 Tengri News reported that "in 2011, the Samruk Kazynasovereign wealth fund allocated a total of $204 thousand to develop the Kazakh-language Wikipedia. This year, another $136 thousand will be earmarked", citing the Fund's Press Service. Wales thanked the Kazakh government for its support of the Kazakh Wikipedia at Wikimania 2012. The Kazakh Wikipedia's unique feature is that it is written in three different scripts: Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic. On 26 October 2011, it passed the 100,000 articles threshold, and by early 2013 had just over 200,000 articles.
Features
The Kazakh Wikipedia uses ZhengZhu's character mapping program to convert between Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic scripts. Its Latin script is of that of Kazinform's.
Questions have been asked about WikiBilim's closeness to the Kazakh government, given that WikiBilim president Rauan Kenzhekhanuly had a long prior career as a Kazakh government official and the Kazakh government has been widely criticised for its crackdown on free speech. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales' friendship with ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who advises the Kazakh government, has also come under scrutiny, as has the neutrality of the Kazakh Wikipedia's content, much of which is a reproduction of the state-published national encyclopedia.
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Statistics
As of , the Kazakh Wikipedia counts about articles. The overwhelming majority of its readers originate from Kazakhstan. As of April 2013, the Kazakh Wikipedia's number of articles accounts for approximately 14% of all the articles written in a Turkic language, making it the second largest edition in the family after Turkish, which accounts for 28% of all Turkic articles. In 2019 the Kazakh Wikipedia has 45 thousand unique categories and 50.72% of them do not have appropriate page in the category. The average article in this language version has 7 categories, while number of unique categories per articles ratio is 0.203. The largest number of articles has Geography and Science category. In Kazakh Wikipedia articles related to Health and Society has the highest average quality. Content about Philosophy is read more often and articles in Sports category have the highest authors' interest on average.
