German and Catalan wikis was created on March 2001

2011/5/11 foundation-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org

Happy birthday.

If you read carefully the mail you are pointing to there it says:

"Toan and I added 9 new other-language wikis to the mix."

But in the list there are 11 languages.

The difference is because it was not the first group of non-English Wikipedias coming online.

...

Message: 4 Date: Tue, 10 May 2011 16:13:55 -0700 From: phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com Subject: [Foundation-l] happy birthday, Wikipedias To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: BANLkTi=BUtCZyCPV589iOrjqjp1Wkvv4-g@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Tomorrow (May 11) is another anniversary date: it's been 10 years since the first group of non-English Wikipedias came online. Originally with spelled-out names rather than language codes, these sites were:

catalan.wikipedia.com chinese.wikipedia.com esperanto.wikipedia.com french.wikipedia.com deutsche.wikipedia.com hebrew.wikipedia.com italian.wikipedia.com japanese.wikipedia.com portuguese.wikipedia.com spanish.wikipedia.com russian.wikipedia.com

(from http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-May/000116.html)

The idea of having Wikipedias in multiple languages came from Jimbo in March 2001 ( http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-March/000048.html

);

...

note that the original German Wikipedia was actually set up at that time, making it the second-oldest Wikipedia. Though the idea of using two-letter domain codes was first raised then, after the above sites were brought online in May there was further discussion, and the sites were switched to two-letter codes a few days later: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-May/000132.html.

Happy tenth birthday, Wikipedias! (and many more!) May all of our language editions flourish.

-- phoebe

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