Wikiquote

Wikiquote is a sister project of Wikipedia, using the same MediaWiki software. It is one of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Based on an idea by Daniel Alston and implemented by Brion Vibber, the goal of the project is to produce collaboratively a vast reference of quotations from prominent people, books and proverbs, and to give details about them.

Initially the project was created in English, but in July 2004, more languages were added.

History

• June 27, 2003 - Temporary put on the wolof language wikipedia: wo.wikipedia.com
• July 10, 2003 - Own subdomain: quote.wikipedia.org
• August 25, 2003 - Own domain: wikiquote.org
• July 17, 2004 - New languages added
• November 13, 2004 - English edition reaches 2000 pages.
• November, 2004 - 24 languages
• March, 2005 - Wikiquote reaches 10,000 pages in total. English edition has close to 3000 pages.
• June, 2005 - 34 languages including one classic (Latin) and one artificial (Esperanto).

Multilingual cooperation

In July 2004, about 70 subdomains were set up, but most of them have no contributors. The followings are parts of subdomains which had been created in July 2004: all of them were attracted by editors' interest at the time and became soon active.

• English language http://en.wikiquote.org/
• Bulgarian language http://bg.wikiquote.org/
• Chinese language http://zh.wikiquote.org/
• Dutch language http://nl.wikiquote.org/
• German language http://de.wikiquote.org/
• Greek language http://el.wikiquote.org/
• French language http://fr.wikiquote.org/
• Polish language http://pl.wikiquote.org/
• Italian language http://it.wikiquote.org/
• Japanese language http://ja.wikiquote.org/
• Korean language http://kr.wikiquote.org/
• Romanian language http://ro.wikiquote.org/
• Spanish language http://es.wikiquote.org/
• Tamil language http://ta.wikiquote.org/
• Thai language http://th.wikiquote.org/
• Afrikaans language http://af.wikiquote.org/
• Portuguese language http://pt.wikiquote.org/
• Turkish language http://tr.wikiquote.org/
• Hebrew language http://he.wikiquote.org

The number of active Wikiquote projects is growing. On January 2005 26 language projects were active. Here 'active' means the project has at least one legitimate article and one edit within a month. After a half year, 34 language projects are known as active.

As of August 13, 2005, four projects have more than 1,000 articles. The biggest Wikiquote is the English project with over 4,000 articles, following German, French, Polish and Bulgarian projects. Around ten projects, including those four, have more than 100 articles.