Persian Wikipedia

Persian Wikipedia
	Screenshot Main Page of the Persian Wikipedia in June 2011
Type of site	Internet encyclopedia
Available in	Persian
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation (non-profit)
URL	fa.wikipedia.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional (required only for certain tasks such as editing protected pages, creating pages or uploading files)
Users	1,133,601 (total registered, as of 11 July 2022)
Launched	19 December 2003; 21 years ago
Content license	Creative Commons Attribution/; Share-Alike 4.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL); Media licensing varies

Persian Wikipedia (Persian: ویکی‌پدیای فارسی, romanized: Wīkipediāī Fārsī) is the Persian language version of Wikipedia. The Persian version of Wikipedia was started in December 2003. As of January 2025, it has 1,024,609 articles, 1,362,540 registered users, and 94,977 files, and it is the 19th largest edition of Wikipedia by article count, and ranks 22nd in terms of depth among Wikipedias. It passed 1,000 articles on 16 December 2004, and 200,000 on 10 July 2012. Roozbeh Pournader is the project's first administrator, developer, and bureaucrat.

It is the most popular language version of Wikipedia in Iran and Afghanistan.

Number of articles

In January 2013, nearly 50,000 new articles were added within a month. A few days later, on 19 February 2013, the Persian Wikipedia reached 300,000 articles, ranking it 18th among all Wikipedias based on the number of articles.^[2]

It currently has 1,024,609 articles, making it the 19th largest Wikipedia by article count.

History of the number of articles:

19 December 2003: started
18 February 2006: reached 10,000 articles
30 October 2008: reached 50,000 articles
25 August 2010: reached 100,000 articles
9 July 2012: reached 200,000 articles
19 February 2013: reached 300,000 articles
18 July 2014: reached 400,000 articles
27 July 2016: reached 500,000 articles
3 May 2018: reached 600,000 articles^[3]
8 November 2019: reached 700,000 articles
26 May 2021: reached 800,000 articles
13 April 2022: reached 900,000 articles
22 April 2024: reached 1,000,000 articles

Article depth

With article depth of 153, the Persian Wikipedia is currently ranked 23rd among all Wikipedias based on article depth.^[4]

Issues

Government intervention

According to reports by human rights lawyer Shadi Sadr, RFERL, Iranwire, Iran International, Justice for Iran, Open Democracy, Radio Zamaneh and other news outlets, the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance and the Iranian Cyber Army may be interfering with the Persian Wikipedia, although the Wikimedia Foundation denies that there is abuse taking place.^[5]^[6]^[7]^[8]^[9]^[10]^[11] In 2019, German news outlet Deutsche Welle reported that WMF had launched an investigation.^[12]

Censorship

In a November 2013 report published by the Center for Global Communication Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, researchers Collin Anderson and Nima Nazeri scanned 800,000 Persian language Wikipedia articles and found that the Iranian government blocks 963 of these pages. According to the authors, "Censors repeatedly targeted Wikipedia pages about government rivals, minority religious beliefs, and criticisms of the state, officials, and the police. Just under half of the blocked Wiki-pages are biographies, including pages about individuals the authorities have allegedly detained or killed."^[13] Anderson said that Persian Wikipedia, as a microcosm of the Iranian internet, is a "useful place to uncover the types of online content forbidden and an excellent template to identify keyword blocking themes and filtering rules that apply across the greater internet."^[14]

On 2 March 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic in Iran, the Persian Wikipedia appeared to be disrupted in Iran after the death of Mohammad Mirmohammadi, who was a close confidant to the country's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.^[15]