The Greek Wikipedia is the Greek-language edition of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. It was December 1, 2002. It surpassed the 10,000 article mark on May 16, 2006 and the 100,000 article mark on April 9, 2014. As of May 23, 2019, it is the 46th largest Wikipedia, behind Belarusian and ahead of Slovene. Greek Wikipedia is the main free internet encyclopedia written in Greek. Its main competitor, Livepedia, started on 2004, had more than 100.000 articles. Many articles of Livepedia were republished articles from donations of various publishing houses and the site was also a wiki. Approximately 250 articles are coming at least partially from Livepedia, thanks to the Livepedia's use of GFDL until November 1, 2008. As of 2018, Greek Wikipedia's pageviews surpassed the 250 million annually. The daily pageviews of Greek Wikipedia vary within the year; peaking in the winter period, while the months with the least pageviews are usually June, July and August. The active users are more than 1,000 today. The highest and lowest active users' numbers are recorded in the same period. The community of Greek Wikipedia has organized some meetups as well. Since 2011, the Wikimedia User Group Greece has aided in the organization of various promotional activities, as well and some article contests.
As of May 2019, Greek Wikipedia is usually visited by 5,500,000 to 6,500,000 unique devices per month, while the unique devices per day are approximately 440,000. The origin of pageviews is mainly from Greece. The remainder of the pageviews comes from Cyprus, Germany, United States, United Kingdom and other countries. As of May 2019, Greece is the source for the bulk of the pageviews, being the source for nearly 27,000,000 pageviews out of 32,500,000 on the same month. As of May 2019, Greek Wikipedia receives approximately 30,000,000 pageviews per month, with a peak at winter months. Together with an increasing number of articles and improvements on quality, the pageviews have improved substantially in the last three years. Since 2017, the annual article growth amounts to 15,000 articles annually, while the average monthly growth amounts to 1,020-1,300 articles per month.
History
Early years
Greek Wikipedia was created on 1 December 2002. At the first months of existence, the new articles were very small and a handful of users was contributing, some of them just adding interwikis to other Wikipedias. The first were launched on November 2005.
Article count
The Greek Wikipedia was created on 4 December 2002. On 16 May 2006 it reached 10,000 articles. On 10 October 2006 it reached 15,000 articles, while on 17 March 2007 it reached 20,000 articles. On this period there were 30 new articles being created every day, while there were 50 active users. In December of that year the Greek Wikipedia reached 30,000 articles, while on 14 February 2009 it reached 40,000 articles. Fourteen months later, on 10 April 2010, it reached 50,000 articles; eleven months later, on 8 March 2011 it reached 60,000 articles. In February 2012 it had 70,000 articles, while 252 days later it reached 80,000 articles. In July 2013, it reached 90,000 articles, while 271 days later it reached 100,000 articles, while 195 days later it reached 110,000 articles. In 11 July 2016, after 629 days, it reached 120,000 articles, due to the general recount of late March 2015 which removed several thousand redirects from the mainspace. As a result, the article count fell to 105,500 articles, while before the recount the article count was 119,500 articles.
In 2019 the Greek Wikipedia has 60 thousand unique categories and 6.37% of them do not have appropriate page in the category. The average article in this language version has 8 categories, while number of unique categories per articles ratio is 0.374. The largest number of articles has Geography and Arts category. In Greek Wikipedia articles related to Food and drink and Sports has the highest average quality. Content about Health is read more often and articles in Entertainment category have the highest authors' interest on average.
In the press, Wikipedia has been referred as a good source of information; however periodically it has been criticised for having a non-neutral point of view in political articles. Also, Greek Wikipedia has received extensive coverage from the Greek-language press for some of its actions, such as the anniversary of 10 years since its opening. In addition to, full articles of Greek Wikipedia or parts of them are often included in news articles and other websites in Greek language.
Press
Εύη Γκολώνη, Wikipedia. Η διαδικτυακή εγκυκλοπαίδεια ενηλικιώνεται, Popular Science, τ..
Ανδρονίκη Κολοβού, "Wikipedia" Η ελεύθερη διαδικτυακή εγκυκλοπαίδεια για τους λάτρεις της γνώσης, τεύχος "Η ζωή μας", ΠΡΩΤΟ ΘΕΜΑ, 2 July 2006
Ηλίας Μαγκλίνη, Η παγκόσμια κοινότητα της Wikipedia, Ελληνικά: πλούτος και σκουπίδια, Η Καθημερινή, ένθετο Τέχνες και Γράμματα
Εύη Ελευθεριάδου, Οι Έλληνες της Βικιπαίδειας, ένθετο "Ορίζοντες", Τα Νέα, 13 December 2006