Estonian Wikipedia greatest number of articles per speaker among Wikipedias with over 100,000 articles, and ranks 10th overall. These figures were based on Ethnologue's estimate of 1,048,660 Estonian speakers. The Estonian Wikipedia is the 41st edition to reach the milestone of 100,000 articles and the third edition in a Uralic language to do so, after the Finnish and Hungarian Wikipedias. As of August 2012, the Estonian Wikipedia's number of articles accounts for approximately 23% of all the articles written in a Finno-Permic language, making it the second largest edition in the family after Finnish, which accounts for 70% of Finno-Permic articles. The
Uralic languages published the most complete work on Finno-Ugric to that date. Up to the beginning of the 19th century, knowledge on the Uralic languages spoken in Russia had remained restricted to scanty observations by travelers. Already Finnish historian Henrik Gabriel Porthan had stressed that further progress would require dedicated field missions. One of the first of these was undertaken by Anders Johan Sjögren, who brought the Vepsians to general knowledge and elucidated in detail the relatedness of Finnish and Komi. Still more extensive were the field research expeditions made in the 1840s by Matthias Castrén (1813–1852) and Antal Reguly (1819–1858), who