Hungarian Wikipedia

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The Hungarian Wikipedia is the Hungarian version of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Started on July 8, 2003 by User:Grin, this version has, as of February 7, 2007, more than 50,000 articles (exactly 50,047 by 23:41 CET).

1 History
2 Current version
- 2.1 Results
3 See also
4 Sources

[edit] History

The first Wikipedia related to the Hungarian language was created on September 5, 2001 by Larry Sanger, the English language Wikipedia coordinator at the time, at the request of a yet unknown editor. He created the address at http://hu.wikipedia.com/. At that time Wikipedia was still running on UseModWiki.

This version is generally called version zero, as it was not a live system at the time. There was no Hungarian coordinator and even the interface wasn't translated. Initial enthusiasm had gone as far as translating the main page - the inside of the encyclopedia was full of nonsense and swearing, totalling five pages by last count.

According to the archives, Zoltán Simon tried in November 2002 to transfer version zero to the new software, Phase III, which was to become MediaWiki later on. From the archives it seems that nothing came out of his initiative, and no one really took on the idea after then, either.

[edit] Current version

Come April 2003, Péter Gervai, an IT specialist, recognized the need for a newer, and hopefully more serious, version of the Hungarian Wikipedia. His enthousiasm and initial experiments were persistent enough to lead to the establishment of a functional and goal oriented community (see below). It turned out to be quite fortunate that the new version was not based on any of the older ones. This had been mainly for technical reasons, as there wasn't an application to convert the old database to the new format, so nobody was really interested in transferring the older content. It was decided that the contents of the older Hungarian "Wikipedia", i.e. the three nonsense pages and the two swearing pages, weren't good enough for the new one, which would be then given a clean and fresh start.

The Hungarian Wikipedia as we know it today was launched on July 8, 2003, the day of open knowledge. On this day, the opening page was made available with a Hungarian interface and in Hungarian, at its current address of http://hu.wikipedia.org/.

Ralesk was the midwife at the project birth - he also participated in preparing the interface and the basic pages required for the encyclopedia (such as How to edit a page).

[edit] Results

The Hungarian Wikipedia is alive and kicking since that day.

With almost a hundred active editors, the Hungarian Wikipedia contains tens of thousands of articles and has moved up from place #34 in 2003 to #22 in the Wikipedia:Multilingual statistics.

According to statistics^[1], on January 1, 2007, the Hungarian Wikipedia contained 46,888 articles and 11,880 images with 1,128,357 edits from 11 administrators and 12,537 registered users. The #22 position follows the Hebrew, Catalan and Indonesian languages. Hungarian Wikipedia has reached 50,000 article in February 7, 2007. Looking at the growth in the number of articles the 100,000 article milestone expected for the summer of 2008.

In addition to the quantity of articles on the Hungarian Wikipedia, their quality is also improving over time. Featured articles have appeared in a wide variety of subjects, from technical and popular topics alike, ranging from astronomy and chemistry to Japanese culture and Harry Potter. The initial, poorly written articles are becoming more and more precise, detailed and comprehensive. The number of featured articles, considered by the Wikipedia community to be show the best quality, is ever on the increase.

The editors' hope has finally become reality: a number of Google searches now show the Wikipedia article on the first page of results, often as the first result. This is both a feat and a responsibility. Editors seek to live up to this responsibility by following the work of others and by discussing questionable issues. The editors seek to achieve a more encompassing, detailed and reliable content than those offered by traditional, printed encyclopedias.