Wikiquote
Free repository of quotes hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation
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.
Initially, the project operated only in English from July 2003, expanding to include other languages in July 2004. As of September 2026, there are active Wikiquote sites for 77 languages comprising a total of 383,625 articles and 2,811 recently active editors.
01History
The Wikiquote site originated in 2003. The article creation milestones are taken from WikiStats.
| 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 across 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) |
02Operation
Wikiquote is one of few online quotation collections that provide the opportunity for visitors to contribute 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.
03Multi-lingual cooperation
As of September 2026, there are Wikiquote sites for 100 languages of which 77 are active and 23 are closed. The active sites have 383,625 articles and the closed sites have 638 articles. There are 4,530,741 registered users of which 2,811 were recently active.
The top ten Wikiquote language projects by mainspace article count:
| No. | Language | ISO | Good | Total | Edits | Admins | Users | Active users | Files |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | English | en | 70,714 | 243,916 | 3,990,756 | 17 | 3,360,771 | 1,272 | 0 |
| 2 | Italian | it | 55,927 | 210,874 | 1,425,110 | 7 | 108,168 | 175 | 262 |
| 3 | Polish | pl | 31,880 | 56,848 | 647,330 | 9 | 61,871 | 76 | 1 |
| 4 | Russian | ru | 18,065 | 45,831 | 448,508 | 5 | 113,996 | 139 | 0 |
| 5 | Czech | cs | 16,471 | 21,163 | 170,144 | 2 | 20,835 | 28 | 1 |
| 6 | Estonian | et | 13,699 | 23,529 | 135,754 | 2 | 5,670 | 16 | 2 |
| 7 | Ukrainian | uk | 12,439 | 42,435 | 161,617 | 5 | 21,268 | 32 | 0 |
| 8 | Portuguese | pt | 12,083 | 36,647 | 226,429 | 4 | 44,305 | 53 | 1 |
| 9 | Hebrew | he | 11,582 | 21,987 | 239,915 | 3 | 27,584 | 48 | 512 |
| 10 | French | fr | 11,010 | 39,367 | 463,954 | 6 | 83,572 | 104 | 0 |
For a complete list with totals see Wikimedia Statistics:
04Use in experiments
It can be possible to utilise Wikiquote as a text corpus for language experiments. 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. Researchers have used Wikiquote to train language models to detect extremist quotes.
05Reception
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. It can be used for analysis to produce claims such as "Albert Einstein is probably the most quoted figure of our time".
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Wikiquote”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Wikiquote-logo-en.svg by Original design and raster version by Neolux; vector version by Minh Nguyen, based on work by Rei-artur and -xfi-, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Wikiquote growth.png by Unknown author, Public domain
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