The Italian Wikipedia (Italian: Wikipedia in italiano) is the Italian-language edition of Wikipedia. This edition was started in January 2002 and has over 500,000 articles and more than 308.000 registered accounts as of October 3, 2008[1].
In August 2005 the Italian Wikipedia overtook the Spanish and Portuguese language editions, becoming the 8th largest edition by article count. The primary reason for the rapid leap from 56,000 to 64,000 articles was an automated bot which created stub articles on more than 8,000 municipalities of Spain in an operation dubbed "Comuni spagnoli".[2][3]
On September 8, 2005, the Italian Wikipedia overtook the Dutch Wikipedia and one day later, on September 9, it passed 100,000 articles. On September 11, it overtook the Swedish Wikipedia, becoming the fifth-largest language edition. Again, automated scripts contributed heavily to the growth. For instance, a bot created more than 35,000 articles on municipalities of France.[4] However it was overtaken by the Polish edition on September 23, 2005.
The amount of administrators has considerably increased during the last few months because of the growing problem with vandalism and copyright violations (which, in some cases, have gone undetected for two or three years). A greater number of administrators will probably be required to get rid of the copyright violations, which have spread to several hundreds of articles. Because of this, general policies are being discussed and new measures are being taken. For example, new users will now be able to follow an exhaustive "tutorial" regarding copyrights of text and images[5].
Features
- The Italian Wikipedia currently accepts free images licensed under the GFDL and Creative Commons. Fair use images have been rejected since April 2006 due to potential copyright problems, and many of them were subsequently replaced during 2007 with equivalents which follow Italian law.
- Unlike the English, French and German Wikipedias, the Italian Wikipedia does not have an Arbitration Committee.
- The Italian Wikipedia has used automated scripts to create articles, much like the English Wikipedia.
- Administrators are elected through a vote; a minimal quorum of 65-70 voters and 80% of support votes are required if the request is to be considered successful. Any administrator is automatically open to recall after a year of service. The community then decides whether to let them keep the role or not with a vote. Administrators who have been inactive (have not used any administrative tools such as the "delete" or "block" buttons) for six months automatically lose their privileges.
Notes and references
External links
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