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The Basque Wikipedia (Basque: Euskarazko Wikipedia or Euskal Wikipedia) is the Basque language edition of Wikipedia. Founded on 6 December 2001, although its main page was created in November 2003, it reached 58,124 articles by 19 August 2010, making it the 45th-largest Wikipedia. As of October2026, it has 940 active contributors, of which 12 are administrators, and has about 499,000 articles.
History
In an August 2007 interview, Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, used the Basque Wikipedia as an example of the rationale for having Wikipedias in smaller languages:
"Certainly within Wikipedia right now we are seeing some fairly successful projects in small European languages. You don't really need a Welsh language Wikipedia, perhaps. The number of people who speak Welsh who don't also speak English is very small and getting smaller every year. So why do we have a Welsh Wikipedia? Well, people wanted it, so they're making it. And language preservation is the main motive. It is their mother tongue and they want to keep it alive, keep its literature alive. Certainly some of the larger small languages like Basque and Catalan have very successful projects. I definitely see that preserving parts of your language and culture through collaborative projects makes a lot of sense."
On 25 January 2008, the Basque Wikipedia was awarded the Argia Saria granted by the magazine Argia in the category of Internet.
On 21 May 2011, Basque Wikipedia published its 100,000 article, an article about the prohibition of using Basque language throughout history called Euskararen debekua. In December 2011, around 11,000 new articles were added to Basque Wikipedia by the Culture Ministry of the Basque Government.
in December 2025, they were the first to upload all the articles in the list of 1,000 articles that all Wikipedians must have, in excess of 30,000 bytes.
Txikipedia
In 2018, the Basque Wikipedia started a sub-project where articles were aimed at children, named Txikipedia ("txiki" being Basque for "small"). It was inspired by an independent French project named Vikidia[fr]. Two years after the launch, the project had 2,600 articles, most being focused on maths and natural sciences.
Statistics
As of September 2024, the Basque Wikipedia has the fourth greatest number of articles per speaker among Wikipedias with over 100,000 articles, and ranks 21st overall. These figures were based on Ethnologue's estimate of 665,800 Basque speakers.
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