Wikiquote

For linking to or citing Wikiquote, see Wikipedia:Wikiquote.

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.

Wikiquote

Wikiquote logo
Screenshot Screenshot of the wikiquote.org home page
Type of site	Quotation repository
Available in	Multilingual (74 active)[1]
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Daniel Alston, Brion Vibber and the Wikimedia community
URL	wikiquote.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional
Launched	10 July 2003; 21 years ago (2003-07-10)
Current status	Active

Presentation about Wikiquote during the Wiki Indaba 2023 conference in Agadir, Morocco

Initially, the project operated only in English from July 2003, expanding to include other languages in July 2004.^[2] As of May 2025, there are active Wikiquote sites for 74 languages^[1] comprising a total of 351,042 articles and 2,108 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 May 2025, there are Wikiquote sites for 97 languages of which 74 are active and 23 are closed.^[1] The active sites have 351,042 articles and the closed sites have 638 articles.^[3] There are 4,329,057 registered users of which 2,108 are recently active.^[3]

The top ten Wikiquote language projects by mainspace article count:^[3]

No.	Language	ISO	Good	Total	Edits	Admins	Users	Active users	Files
1	English	en	58,398	222,004	3,701,413	15	3,218,092	518	0
2	Italian	it	52,940	203,450	1,374,592	9	102,768	202	264
3	Polish	pl	30,371	53,977	603,574	8	58,959	72	1
4	Russian	ru	17,228	44,164	426,022	5	108,894	78	0
5	Czech	cs	14,476	19,047	164,439	2	20,037	27	1
6	Estonian	et	13,578	22,985	132,216	2	5,103	19	2
7	Portuguese	pt	11,926	36,340	222,499	4	42,642	34	1
8	Ukrainian	uk	11,088	40,055	148,106	5	19,932	34	0
9	Hebrew	he	10,396	20,529	224,552	3	25,933	30	502
10	French	fr	9,729	36,489	416,348	6	78,786	56	0

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 for 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]}

See also

• Exact statistics
• Wiktionary