Wikiquote
Type of site | Quotation repository |
---|---|
Available in | Multilingual (67 active) |
Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
Created by | Daniel Alston, Brion Vibber and the Wikimedia community |
URL | www |
Commercial | No |
Registration | Optional |
Launched | 10 July 2003 |
Current status | active |
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 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.
Initially, the project was created solely in English in July 2003; a later expansion to include additional languages was started in July 2004. As of August 2022, there are active Wikiquote sites for 67 languages comprising a total of 277,998 articles and 1,534 recently active editors.
History
The Wikiquote site originated in 2003. The article creation milestones are taken from WikiStats.
Date | Event |
---|---|
27 June 2003
|
Temporarily put on the Wolof language Wikipedia (wo.wikipedia.org). |
10 July 2003
|
Own subdomain created (quote.wikipedia.org). |
25 August 2003
|
Own domain created (wikiquote.org). |
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 (Latin) and one artificial (Esperanto) |
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. |
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 (Italy) |
Operation
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.
Multi-lingual cooperation
As of August 2022, there are Wikiquote sites for 89 languages of which 67 are active and 22 are closed. The active sites have 277,998 articles and the closed sites have 638 articles. There are 4,099,847 registered users of which 1,534 are recently active.
The top ten Wikiquote language projects by mainspace article count:
No. | Language | Wiki | Good | Total | Edits | Admins | Users | Active users | Files |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Italian | it | 44,235 | 181,538 | 1,223,329 | 11 | 91,489 | 91 | 285 |
2 | English | en | 43,206 | 188,473 | 3,145,327 | 16 | 3,128,475 | 411 | 0 |
3 | Polish | pl | 24,742 | 52,354 | 536,075 | 8 | 53,010 | 76 | 1 |
4 | Russian | ru | 15,165 | 40,126 | 380,719 | 6 | 96,852 | 71 | 0 |
5 | Czech | cs | 12,152 | 16,236 | 133,450 | 3 | 17,486 | 18 | 1 |
6 | Estonian | et | 10,108 | 16,600 | 89,857 | 3 | 3,703 | 19 | 3 |
7 | Portuguese | pt | 9,303 | 32,047 | 185,403 | 3 | 37,287 | 41 | 19 |
8 | Persian | fa | 9,100 | 31,253 | 171,388 | 5 | 26,666 | 28 | 39 |
9 | Ukrainian | uk | 7,940 | 34,305 | 120,415 | 6 | 15,832 | 30 | 0 |
10 | German | de | 7,878 | 20,227 | 517,656 | 6 | 62,504 | 37 | 17 |
For a complete list with totals see Wikimedia Statistics:
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 (NIPS 2017) used Wikiquote to produce a conversational talker module for extraction of rare words. Researchers have used Wikiquote to train language models to detect extremist quotes.
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".