Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-06-20/100 times 100

Wikipedia achieved an interesting milestone in its multilingual development last week — there are now 100 different language versions of Wikipedia that have at least 100 articles apiece.

The Nahuatl Wikipedia was the 100th to reach the 100-article mark, after Nauruan crossed the threshold with a flurry of new articles earlier in the week. The hundredth article was an (illustrated) stub on the coyote, created at 23:47 (UTC) on Saturday, 18 June, by Chamdarae. Chamdarae actually created three articles to bring Nahuatl up to 100 articles, but activity there remains sporadic, as these were the first new articles created since May.

Nahuatl is the first purely Native American language to achieve 100 articles. As yet, no purely indigenous African languages have reached this mark, although it appears that some may do so in the near future. (It should be noted that among languages native to Africa and America, two have already passed 100 articles, but both of these are partially of European origin — Afrikaans and Haitian Creole.) Among African languages, Swahili is currently in the lead, although Bambara has seen considerable recent growth thanks to funding and support from Geekcorps.

Commenting on trends in the development of new language Wikipedias, Tuf-Kat noted, "Recent growth in new languages has mostly been in South Asian languages like Gujarati, Kannada, Urdu, Malayalam, Tamil and Bengali, as well as regional minority languages in Europe, like Corsican, Cornish, Breton and Sicilian." Yann has been particularly active in promoting languages from the Indian subcontinent, and Node ue has tried to encourage work on many new Wikipedias, including the smaller European languages.