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Presentation about Wikiquote during the Wiki Indaba 2023 conference in Agadir, Morocco
Wikiquote is part of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation using MediaWiki software. The project's objective is to collaboratively produce a vast reference of quotations from prominent people, books, films, proverbs, etc. and writings about them. The website aims to be as accurate as possible regarding the provenance and sourcing of the quotations.
Initially, the project operated only in English from July 2003, expanding to include other languages in July 2004.[2] As of January 2025, there are active Wikiquote sites for 74 languages[1] comprising a total of 343,548 articles and 2,032 recently active editors.[3]
History
Growth of the largest eight Wikiquotes until early 2008
The Wikiquote site originated in 2003.[4] The article creation milestones are taken from WikiStats.[2]
Date
Event
27 June 2003
Temporarily put on the Wolof language Wikipedia (wo.wikipedia.org).
10 July 2003
Own subdomain created (quote.wikipedia.org).
25 August 2003
Own domain created (wikiquote.org).
17 July 2004
New languages added.
13 November 2004
English edition reaches 2,000 pages.
November 2004
Reaches 24 languages.
March 2005
Reaches 10,000 pages in total. English edition has close to 3,000 pages.
June 2005
Reaches 34 languages, including one classical (Latin) and one artificial (Esperanto)
4 November 2005
English Wikiquote reaches 5,000 pages.
April 2006
French Wikiquote taken down for legal reasons.
4 December 2006
French Wikiquote restarted.
7 May 2007
English Wikiquote reaches 10,000 pages.
July 2007
Reaches 40 languages.
February 2010
Reaches a total of 100,000 articles among all languages.
May 2016
Reaches a total of 200,000 articles among all languages.
January 2018
Introduced in the curriculum of national partnerships between schools and non-profits (Italy[5])
Operation
Wikiquote is one of few online quotation collections that provides the opportunity for visitors to contribute[6] and the very few which strive to provide exact sources for each quotation as well as corrections of misattributed quotations. Wikiquote pages are cross-linked to articles about the notable personalities on Wikipedia.[7]
Multi-lingual cooperation
As of January 2025, there are Wikiquote sites for 97 languages of which 74 are active and 23 are closed.[1] The active sites have 343,548 articles and the closed sites have 638 articles.[3] There are 4,306,697 registered users of which 2,032 are recently active.[3]
The top ten Wikiquote language projects by mainspace article count:[3]
For a complete list with totals see Wikimedia Statistics: [8]
Use in experiments
It can be possible to utilise Wikiquote as a text corpus for language experiments.[9]
The University of Wroclaw team entering Conversational Intelligence Challenge of the 2017 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2017) used Wikiquote to produce a conversational talker module for extraction of rare words.[10]
Researchers have used Wikiquote to train language models to detect extremist quotes.[11]
Reception
Wikiquote has been suggested as "a great starting point for a quotation search" with only quotes with sourced citations being available. It is also noted as a source from frequent misquotes and their possible origins.[12][13] It can be used for analysis to produce claims such as "Albert Einstein is probably the most quoted figure of our time".[14][non-primary source needed]
^Woods, Dan; Theony, Peter (February 2011). "3: The Thousand Problem-Solving Faces of Wikis". Wikis for Dummies. John Wiley & Sons. p. 58. ISBN978-1-118-05066-8. OCLC897595141. OL5741003W.
^"Protocollo MIUR-Wikimedia" (in Italian). Ministero dell'istruzione, dell'università e della ricerca. 26 January 2018. Archived from the original on 28 January 2018. Retrieved 28 January 2018.
^Buscaldi, D.; Rosso, P. (2007). Masulli F.; Mitra S.; Pasi G. (eds.). Some Experiments in Humour Recognition Using the Italian Wikiquote Collection. International Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Applications. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-73400-0_58. ISBN978-3-540-73399-7.
^Chorowski, Jan; Łancucki, Adrian; Malik, Szymon; Pawlikowski, Maciej; Rychlikowski, Paweł; Zykowski, Paweł (21 May 2018). A Talker Ensemble: the University of Wrocław's Entry to the NIPS 2017 Conversational Intelligence Challenge (Report). arXiv:1805.08032v1.
^Rickson, Sharon (22 November 2013). "How to Research a Quotation". New York Public Library. On the Web. Archived from the original on 18 October 2018. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
