French Wikipedia

The French Wikipedia () is the French-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. This edition was started on 23 March 2001, two months after the official creation of Wikipedia. It has articles as of , , making it the fifth-largest Wikipedia overall, after the English-, Cebuano-, Swedish- and German-language editions, the largest Wikipedia edition in a Romance language. It has the third-most edits, and ranks among Wikipedias. It was also the third edition, after the English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia, to exceed 1 million encyclopedia articles: this occurred on 23 September 2010. In April 2016, the project had 4657 active editors who made at least five edits in that month.
In 2008, the French encyclopaedia "Quid" cancelled its 2008 edition, citing falling sales on competition from the French edition of Wikipedia.
As of , there are users, admins and files on the French Wikipedia.
On 2 December 2014, the French-language Wikipedia encyclopedia became the 3rd linguistic edition by number of registered users since its creation, overtaking for the first time the German edition, with registered users, behind the English () and Spanish () language editions.
According to a 2013 study by Taha Yasseri et al., from Oxford Internet Institute, Ségolène Royal () and unidentified flying object () were the most controversial articles on the French Wikipedia.
Statistics.
The audience measurement company Médiamétrie questioned a sample of 8,500 users residing in France with access to Internet at home or at their place of work. Médiamétrie found that in June 2007, French Wikipedia had: 7,910,000 unique visitors that visited the site at least once during the month of June 2007 (compared to 4,355,000 unique visitors in June 2006); 2.7 visits per visitor during the period (2.0 visits in June 2006); had held the 12th position (21st in 2006) in "the Top 30 most visited sites in France, "excluding" Internet applications," according to the criterion of the number of unique visitors and 12th position in "the Top 30 most visited sites in France, "including" Internet applications," like eMule or Real Networks (22nd position in June 2006).
By August 2011, French Wikipedia was the 7th most visited site in France, with nearly 16 million unique visitors a month (according to Médiamétrie). In April 2012, it had 20 million unique visitors per month, or 2.4 million per day with over 700 million page views.
For the majority of the external links referenced in the articles, a program running on French Wikipedia automatically generates a link titled "[archive]", which is the union of two parts: the first one starts with "http://archive.kiwix.com/cache/?url=", and the second is derived from the referenced URL. This feature has been created for the long-term digital preservation of the external references (so that the archive stay accessible even if the original reference is deleted).