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 December 2025, Wikipedia articles have been created in 358 editions, with 342 currently active and 16 closed. (and 11 moved to 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".