Wikipedia started being multilingual in May 2001., Wikipedia had approximately 9.25 million articles in 253 languages. The Urdu Wikipedia was created on January 27, 2004. At first, Urdu Wikipedia faced technical problems with the Urdu script font, but now this matter is mostly settled; some unsolved areas remain. Urdu is written in Perso-Arabic script, a right-to-left writing system. As a result, users sometimes need to configure their operating systems and web browsers accordingly. Currently Urdu Wikipedia uses "Urdu Naskh Asiatype" font, which was introduced and is freely distributed by BBC at BBC Urdu Service website. The font is primarily used for article bodies and headings. Urdu variation of Times New Roman is used for navigation links. Both of these fonts are variations of Naskh style. Some Pakistani variations of complex Nasta'liq script are also supported only as a secondary choice in class definitions of CSS, i.e. if default font is not found on client system, then Nasta'liq script is used. The translation of the Wikipedia interface and project information pages into Urdu is still in progress. Some pages about how to edit have been translated.
Milestones
Research
In 2019, the Urdu Wikipedia has 178 thousand unique categories and 4.96% of them do not have appropriate page in the category. The average article in this language version has 7 categories, while number of unique categories per articles ratio is 1.23. The largest number of articles has Government and Politics category. In Urdu Wikipedia articles related to Organizations and Crime has the highest average quality. Content about Military is read more often and articles in Education category have the highest authors' interest on average.
Verifiability
In March 2020 the Urdu Wikipedia contained 259.3 thousand references, wherein 0.57% of them had the DOIidentifier and 3.23% of references contained the ISBN number. Total share of articles on the Urdu Wikipedia with at least one reference was 74.32%. At the time it had 2.08% and 0.12% of articles with at least 10 and 100 references respectively.
