Wikiquote


Wikiquote is one of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation, running on MediaWiki software. Based on an idea by Daniel Alston and implemented by Brion Vibber, the goal of the project, which began as an outgrowth to Wikipedia Famous Quotations, is to produce collaboratively a vast reference of quotations from prominent people, books, films, proverbs, etc. and to be as proper as possible in regard to the details of the quotations and also providing the appropriate human reference of the quotation.
Though there are many online collections of quotations, Wikiquote is distinguished by being among the few that provide an opportunity for visitors to contribute and the very few which strive to provide exact sources for each quotation as well as corrections of misattributed quotations. Wikiquote pages are cross-linked to articles about the notable personalities on Wikipedia.
Initially, the project was created solely in English; a later expansion to include additional languages was started in July 2004.

History

The WikiQuote site originated in 2003. The article creation milestones are taken from WikiStats.
DateEvent
27 June 2003
Temporarily put on the Wolof language Wikipedia.
10 July 2003
Own subdomain created.
25 August 2003
Own domain created.
17 July 2004
New languages added.
13 November 2004
English edition reaches 2,000 pages.
November 2004
Reaches 24 languages.
March 2005
Reaches 10,000 pages in total. English edition has close to 3,000 pages.
June 2005
Reaches 34 languages, including one classical and one artificial
4 November 2005
English Wikiquote reaches 5,000 pages.
April 2006
French Wikiquote taken down for legal reasons.
4 December 2006
French Wikiquote restarted.
7 May 2007
English Wikiquote reaches 10,000 pages.
July 2007
Reaches 40 languages.
February 2010
Reaches a total of 100,000 articles among all languages.
October 2011
Enters the global Alexa top 2500 ranking.
May 2016
Reaches a total of 200,000 articles among all languages.
January 2018
Introduced in the curriculum of national partnerships between schools and non-profits

Multi-lingual cooperation

As of September 2016, there are a total of 89 language versions of Wikiquote with 31 of those containing over 1,000 articles. Sixty of the 89 versions of Wikiquote have over 100 articles. The ten largest Wikiquote language projects with over 5,000 articles each are listed here in descending order:
  1. English
  2. Italian
  3. Polish
  4. Russian
  5. Czech
  6. German
  7. Portuguese
  8. Persian
  9. Spanish
  10. Ukrainian

    Use in experiments

It can be possible to utilise WikiQuote as a text corpus for language experiments. The University of Wroclaw team entering Conversational Intelligence Challenge of the 2017 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems used WikiQuote to produce a conversational talker module for extraction of rare words.

Reception

Wikiquote has been suggested as "a great starting point for a quotation search" with only quotes with sourced citations being available. It is also noted as a source from frequent misquotes and their possible origins. It can be used for analysis to produce claims such as "Albert Einstein is probably the most quoted figure of our time".