Italian Wikipedia

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Italian Wikipedia is the Italian-language edition of Wikipedia. This edition was started in January 2002 and has more than 220,438 articles, as of December 5, 2006. [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, 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.

During December, the Italian Wikipedia had more than 220,000 articles and passed 100,000 users, and 88 sysop. 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 haven been spread to several hundreds (if not thousands) 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.

[edit] Home page controversy

The Italian Wikipedia home page has been criticised of being too eye-candy, overcrowded and badly formed (images in the right bar are not completely inside it). This offset is though intentional and not a mistake with the templates.