Simple English Wikipedia

The Simple English Wikipedia was launched on 18 September 2001.

In 2012, Andrew Lih, a Wikipedian and author, told NBC News' Helen A.S. Popkin that the Simple English Wikipedia does not "have a high standing in the Wikipedia community", and that it had never had a clear purpose. Popkin felt it was unclear whether the site was aimed at younger users, or intended to present simpler versions of complex articles.

Material from the Simple English Wikipedia formed the basis for One Encyclopedia per Child, a project in One Laptop per Child that ended in 2014.

In 2018, a proposal was raised on the Wikimedia Foundation's Meta-Wiki that the Simple English Wikipedia be closed on the grounds that there was no proof that the target audience was reading it. The proposal was rejected on the basis that there was no policy justification for closing the wiki and there was no consensus to do so.

As of September 2026, the site contains over 285,000 content pages. It has more than 1,849,000 registered users, of whom 3,247 have made an edit in the past month.

The articles on the Simple English Wikipedia are usually shorter than their English Wikipedia counterparts, typically presenting only basic information. Tim Dowling of The Guardian newspaper explained that "the Simple English version tends to stick to commonly accepted facts". The interface is also more simply labeled; for instance, the "Random article" link on the English Wikipedia is replaced with a "Show any page" link; users are invited to "change" rather than "edit" pages; clicking on a red link shows a "page not created" message rather than the usual "page does not exist". The project encourages, but does not enforce, the use of a vocabulary of around 1,500 commonly used English words that is based on Basic English, an 850-word controlled natural language created by Charles Kay Ogden in the 1920s.