Kazakh Wikipedia
The Kazakh Wikipedia is the Kazakh language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, founded on 2 June 2002.
Contents
History
The Kazakh Wikipedia was started in June 2002. The Kazakh Wikipedia had a very high growth rate in 2011, going from 7,000 articles to over 100,000 in less than one year,<ref name=KKstats/> largely due to the incorporation of materials from the Kazakh Encyclopedia, which have been released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License (CC BY-SA). This rapid expansion was initiated by the non-profit Wikibilim Foundation.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The Samruk Kazyna Foundation, Kazakhstan's sovereign oil wealth fund, sponsored the expansion, with 30 million tenge spent in 2011 for paid editing, digitalization, and author rights transfer.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="Telegraph Kazakh">Template:Cite web</ref> At the Wikimania 2011 conference WikiBilim president Rauan Kenzhekhanuly was awarded the "Wikipedian of the Year" award by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales for his work on the Kazakh Wikipedia expansion.<ref name="Telegraph Kazakh"/>
In April 2012 Tengri News reported that "in 2011, the Samruk Kazyna sovereign wealth fund allocated a total of $204 thousand to develop the Kazakh-language Wikipedia. This year, another $136 thousand will be earmarked", citing the Fund’s Press Service.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Wales thanked the Kazakh government for its support of the Kazakh Wikipedia at Wikimania 2012.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
The Kazakh Wikipedia's uniqueTemplate:Citation needed feature is that it is written in three different scripts: Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic. On 26 October 2011, it passed the 100,000 articles threshold, and by early 2013 had just over 200,000 articles.<ref name=KKstats>Template:Cite web</ref>
Features
The Kazakh Wikipedia uses ZhengZhu's character mapping program to convert between Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic scripts.Template:Cn
Relationship between WikiBilim and the Government of Kazakhstan
Questions have been asked about WikiBilim's closeness to the Kazakh government, given that WikiBilim president Rauan Kenzhekhanuly had a long prior career as a Kazakh government official and the Kazakh government has been widely criticised for its crackdown on free speech.<ref name="Telegraph Kazakh"/><ref name="Daily Dot Kazakh"/> Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales' friendship with ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who advises the Kazakh government, has also come under scrutiny,<ref name="Telegraph Kazakh"/><ref name="Daily Dot Kazakh">Template:Cite web</ref> as has the neutrality of the Kazakh Wikipedia's content, much of which is a reproduction of the state-published national encyclopedia.<ref name="netprophet">Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Statistics
| Template:Bar box |
As of April 2025, the Kazakh Wikipedia counts about {{#expr:Template:NUMBEROF round -3}} articles. The overwhelming majority of its readers originate from Kazakhstan.
As of April 2013, the Kazakh Wikipedia's number of articles accounts for approximately 14% of all the articles written in a Turkic language, making it the second largest edition in the family after Turkish, which accounts for 28% of all Turkic articles.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>Template:-
Gallery
- Kazenc.jpg
The letter from the Kazakh Encyclopedia stating the release of its materials under a CC BY-SA license.
- Kazakh Wiki-logo-100000.png
The Kazakh Wikipedia's 100K commemorative logo. (Fall 2011)
- Kazakh Wiki-logo-TWC.png
Kazakh Wikipedia logo at the time of the Turkic Wikimedia Conference. (April 2012)
- Kazakh Wiki-logo-200000.png
The Kazakh Wikipedia's 200K commemorative logo. (Nov 2012)
References
- Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia. Hyperion, New York City. 2009. First Edition. ISBN 978-1-4013-0371-6 (alkaline paper).
Notes
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