Italian Wikipedia Italian Wikipedia The Italian Wikipedia () is the Italian-language edition of Wikipedia. This edition was created on May 11, 2001 and first edited on June 11, 2001. As of 23 2019 it has articles and more than registered accounts. It is the 8th-largest Wikipedia by the number of articles (after the English, Swedish, German, Dutch, French, Cebuano, and Russian editions). As early as March 2001, Jimmy Wales, the creator and co-founder of the original English language Wikipedia, had proposed the creation of parallel Wikipedia projects in other languages. The Italian language version was among the first ones to be created,
Jimmy Wales traveled outside North America prior to the site's founding, his participation in the Wikipedia project has seen him flying internationally on a near-constant basis as its public face. When Larry Sanger left Wikipedia, Wales's approach was different from Sanger's. Wales was fairly hands-off. Despite involvement in other projects, Wales has denied intending to reduce his role within Wikipedia, telling "The New York Times" in 2008 that "Dialing down is not an option for me ... Not to be too dramatic about it, but, 'to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on