, an American Esperantist, is considered to be Esperanto Wikipedia's founder. The encyclopedia started off when he imported the 139 articles of the Enciklopedio Kalblanda by Stefano Kalb, which took him three weeks following 15 November 2001. Later on, he undertook a journey to Europe with the goal of popularizing Wikipedia among the speakers of Esperanto in European countries. For instance, already in November 2002 he gave a talk about Wikipedia at the 10th Conference on the Application of Esperanto in Science and Technology in Dobřichovice. Esperanto speakers have also been involved in the founding of several other language versions of the Wikipedia. The introduction of support for the Esperanto alphabet by Brion Vibber, an Esperanto speaker and later Wikimedia Foundation's first employee, in January 2002 has paved the way for alphabets of languages other than English and initiated the transition of the whole Wikipedia to Unicode.
Quality of the Esperanto Wikipedia
As of July 2018, the Esperanto Wikipedia has 287 articles of and a further 206 considered . Weekly community projects include a which improves neglected articles and an Article of the Week featuring good-quality articles on the front page. The Esperanto community is a frequent contributor to the Meta project, :meta:Translation of the week|Translation of the week. According to the :meta:List of Wikipedias by sample of articles|List of Wikipedias by sample of articles at Meta, a list based on :meta:List of articles every Wikipedia should have|List of articles every Wikipedia should have, Esperanto ranks 36th, lacking almost none of the list of vital articles, but having in general relatively short articles. On 18 November 2008, the Esperanto Wikipedia implemented the extension. As of February 2012, the Esperanto Wikipedia had the 5th greatest number of articles per speaker among Wikipedias with over 100,000 articles, and ranked 11th overall. These figures were based on Ethnologues estimate of 2,000,000 Esperanto speakers. Due to the geographical spread of its editors, the Esperanto Wikipedia has a varied list of countries of origin of its editors. On 13 August 2014 Esperanto Wikipedia reached 200,000 articles. In 2019 the Esperanto Wikipedia has 83 thousand unique categories and 18.87% of them do not have appropriate page in the category namespace. The average article in this language version has 4 categories, while number of unique categories per articles ratio is 0.325. The largest number of articles has People and Geography category. In Esperanto Wikipedia articles related to Life and Religion has the highest average quality. Content about Events is read more often and articles in Philosophy category have the highest authors' interest on average. In March 2020 the Esperanto Wikipedia contained 230 thousand references, wherein 2.09% of them had the DOI identifier and 7.88% of references contained the ISBN number. Total share of articles on the Esperanto Wikipedia with at least one reference was 19.89%. At the time it had 1.48% and 0.05% of articles with at least 10 and 100 references respectively.
The Esperanto Wikipedia community has created and published a 40-page "Wikipedia: Practical Handbook" which is sold on-line and at conventions. The manual is intended to give new Wikipedians advice and information on how to edit Wikipedia in Esperanto. It is currently in its second printing.
