French Wikipedia
Screenshot Main Page of the French Wikipedia in March 2021 | |
Type of site | Online encyclopedia |
|---|---|
| Available in | French |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
| URL | fr |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Users | 5.69 million (as of 16 March 2026) |
| Launched | 23 March 2001 |
Content license | Creative Commons Attribution/ Share-Alike 4.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL) Media licensing varies |
The French Wikipedia (French: Wikipédia en français) is the French-language edition of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. This edition was started on 23 March 2001, two months after the official creation of Wikipedia. It has 2,745,410 articles as of 16 March 2026, making it the fourth-largest Wikipedia language version, after the English-, Cebuano-, and German-language editions, and the largest Wikipedia edition in a Romance language. It has the third-most edits, and ranks 6th in terms of depth among Wikipedia editions, in addition to being the third-largest Wikipedia edition by number of active users as of January 2025. It was the third edition, after the English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia, to exceed 1 million articles: this occurred on 23 September 2010. In April 2016, the project had 4,657 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 March 2026, there are 5,693,000 users, 143 admins and 78,263 files on the French Wikipedia.
On 2 December 2014, the French-language Wikipedia became the third-largest language edition by number of registered users, overtaking for the first time the German edition, with 2,022,504 registered users, behind the English (23,300,456) and Spanish (3,401,493) language editions.