The Kazakh Wikipedia ( Kazakh Cyrillic: , Latin: , Arabic: ) is the

Kazakh language The Kazakh or simply Qazaq (Latin: or , Cyrillic: or , Arabic Script: or , , ) is a Turkic language of the Kipchak branch spoken in Central Asia by Kazakhs. It is closely related to Nogai, Kyrgyz and Karakalpak. It is the official lan ...

edition of the free online encyclopedia

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

, founded on 2 June 2002.

History

The Kazakh Wikipedia started in June 2002. The Kazakh Wikipedia had a very high growth rate in 2011, going from 7,000 articles to over 100,000 in less than one year, largely due to the incorporation of materials from the Kazakh Encyclopedia, which have been released under a

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

Attribution Share-Alike License (CC BY-SA). This rapid expansion was initiated by the non-profit Wikibilim Foundation. The Samruk Kazyna Foundation, Kazakhstan's sovereign oil wealth fund, sponsored the expansion, with 30 million

tenge The tenge ( or ; kk, теңге, teñge, ; Currency symbol, sign: ₸ ; ISO 4217, code: KZT) is the currency of Kazakhstan. It is divided into 100 tiyn ( kk, тиын, tıyın also transliterated as ''tiyin''). History After the breakup of th ...

spent in 2011 for paid editing, digitalization, and author rights transfer. At the Wikimania 2011 conference WikiBilim president Rauan Kenzhekhanuly was awarded the

Wikipedian of the Year The Wikimedian of the Year is an annual award that honors Wikipedia editors and other contributors to Wikimedia projects to highlight major achievements within the Wikimedia movement, established in August 2011 by Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wa ...

award by Wikipedia co-founder

Jimmy Wales Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known on Wikipedia by the pseudonym Jimbo, is an American-British Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedi ...

for his work on the Kazakh Wikipedia expansion. In April 2012 Tengri News reported that "in 2011, the Samruk Kazyna sovereign wealth fund allocated a total of $204 thousand to develop the Kazakh-language Wikipedia. This year, another $136 thousand will be earmarked", citing the Fund's Press Service. Wales thanked the Kazakh government for its support of the Kazakh Wikipedia at

Wikimania 2012 Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement's annual conference, organized by volunteers and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics of presentations and discussions include Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, other wikis, open-source software, f ...

. The Kazakh Wikipedia can be viewed and written in three different scripts:

Cyrillic , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = G ...

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

, and

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...

. On 26 October 2011, it passed the 100,000 articles threshold, and by early 2013 had just over 200,000 articles.

Features

The Kazakh Wikipedia uses ZhengZhu's character mapping program to convert between Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic scripts. While its Latin script utilizes Kazinform's own romanization system.

Controversies

Questions have been asked about WikiBilim's closeness to the

Kazakh government The Government of the Republic of Kazakhstan ( kk, Қазақстан Республикасының Үкіметі, tr, ''Qazaqstan Respublikasynyñ Ükımetı'') oversees a presidential republic. The President of Kazakhstan, currently Kassym- ...

, given that WikiBilim president Rauan Kenzhekhanuly had a long prior career as a Kazakh government official and the government has been widely criticised for its crackdown on free speech. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales' friendship with ex-British Prime Minister

Tony Blair Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) is a British former politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. He previously served as Leader of th ...

, who advises the Kazakh government, has also come under scrutiny, as has the neutrality of the Kazakh Wikipedia's content, much of which is a reproduction of the state-published national encyclopedia. In 2015, Jimmy Wales stated on

Reddit Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images ...

that at the time he gave Kenzhekhanuly the inaugural Wikipedian of the Year award, he'd been unaware of Kenzhekhanuly's prior positions as first secretary at Kazakhstan's embassy in Moscow and as an adviser to the governor of Kazakhstan's Mangystau region; by 2015, Kenzhekhanuly had gone on to become deputy governor of Kazakhstan's Kyzylorda region and founding director of Eurasian Council on Foreign Affairs, a think-tank funded by the Kazakh government.

Statistics

As of , the Kazakh Wikipedia has about articles. The overwhelming majority of its readers originate from

Kazakhstan Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country located mainly in Central Asia and partly in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the north and west, China to the east, Kyrgyzstan to the southeast, Uzbeki ...

. As of April 2013, the Kazakh Wikipedia's number of articles accounts for approximately 14% of all the articles written in a Turkic language, making it the second largest edition in the family after Turkish, which accounts for 28% of all Turkic articles.

Gallery

File:Kazenc.jpg, The letter from the Kazakh Encyclopedia stating the release of its materials under a CC BY-SA license. File:Kazakh Wiki-logo-100000.png, The Kazakh Wikipedia's 100K commemorative logo. (Fall 2011) File:Kazakh Wiki-logo-TWC.png, Kazakh Wikipedia logo at the time of the Turkic Wikimedia Conference. (April 2012) File:Kazakh Wiki-logo-200000.png, The Kazakh Wikipedia's 200K commemorative logo. (Nov 2012)

References

Sources

* Lih, Andrew. '' The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia''. Hyperion,

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. 2009. First Edition. (alkaline paper).

External links

* *
Kazakh Wikipedia
*
Kazakh Wikipedia mobile version

WikiBilim: About Foundation
* Wikimedia Community of Kazakh language User Group 27 March 2020 {{Wikipedias in Turkic languages Wikipedias by language Kazakh-language mass media Internet properties established in 2002 Internet in Kazakhstan Science and technology in Kazakhstan Kazakh encyclopedias