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 September 2026, Wikipedia articles have been created in 364 editions, with 348 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".
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Variations in editions
Wikipedia projects vary in how they divide dialects and variants. For example, the English Wikipedia includes most modern varieties of English including American English and British English. Similarly, the Catalan Wikipedia encompasses all Catalan variants, such as Valencian, Balearic, or France's Catalan; Spanish Wikipedia includes both Peninsular Spanish and Latin American Spanish; and the Portuguese Wikipedia includes both European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. In contrast, some languages have multiple Wikipedias. For example, Serbo-Croatian encompasses four Wikipedia editions: Serbo-Croatian and three different standardized varieties (Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian).
Additionally, some Wikipedia projects apply different approaches to orthography. For instance, the Chinese Wikipedia automatically transliterates between six standard forms: three using simplified Chinese characters (Mainland China, Malaysia, and Singapore) and three using traditional Chinese characters (Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau). And rather than relying on transliteration, Belarusian has separate Wikipedia projects for the official Narkamaŭka and Taraškievica orthographies.
Wikipedia edition codes
Each Wikipedia project has a code, which is used as a subdomain of wikipedia.org. The codes mostly conform to ISO 639-1 two-letter codes or ISO 639-2/ISO 639-3 three-letter codes, with preference given to a two-letter code if available. For example, en stands for English in ISO 639-1, so the English Wikipedia is at en.wikipedia.org. There are also some Wikimedia-specific original creations like simple (for the Simple English Wikipedia) or be-tarask (for the Belarusian Wikipedia).
Wikipedia editions
For an updated list sorted by article count see meta:List of Wikipedias (including also a list of the wikipedias with nonstandard language codes and redirects).
Active Wikipedias
The table below lists all the language editions of Wikipedia sorted by the date of launch.
Closed and read-only Wikipedias
The table below lists all the closed and read-only, language and non-language editions of Wikipedia sorted by the date of closing.
Deleted Wikipedias but hosted elsewhere
The table below lists all the deleted language editions of Wikipedia sorted by the date of deletion.
Test Wikipedias
The table below lists all test Wikipedias.