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Lusophone Wikipedia has reached five hundred thousand articles

BR - August 12, 2009:
PT - August 13, 2009:

The Lusophone Wikipedia reached today the five hundred thousand written entries milestone. The Wikipedia in Portuguese or Lusophone Wikipedia is the Portuguese version of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Entirely written by volunteers, it is host by a non-profit foundation called en:Wikimedia Foundation.

The Wikipedia in Portuguese was the fifth edition of Wikipedia to be created and it's nowadays the ninth largest of the 267 versions in other languages. It started its activities in May 2001, having reached the milestone of one hundred thousand entries in January 26, 2006. Its three-hundredth entrie, Utopia (Flórida), was written especially for the occasion and was created in October 10, 2007.

Wikipedia is constructed by the collaborative work, is governed by the neutral point of view as editorial principle and the process wiki as the content management system. Everyone has the right to edit or creat an entrie in Wikipedia without asking prior permission and without the necessity to identify. New arrivals editors are always welcome. Purposeful errors are normally corrected in a matter of seconds.

The Wikipedia in portuguese version is view on average more than 280 thousand times per hour. According to the site en:Alexa Internet, the domain wikipedia.org is the seventh most visited in the world, the sixteenth [1] most visited in Brazil and the forteenth [2] in Portugal.

Since its creation, the lusophone Wikipedia has received attention not only from the press, but also from academic analysis. Some of the aspects that drew the attention of researchers was the multicultural conviviality and the strategies found by the collaborators to resolve language conflicts within the project. Indeed, Wikipedia respect all the portuguese language versions and encourages participation of all speakers of portuguese.

In 2008, the lusophone Wikipedia defined a timetable for the phased adoption of the Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990. Thus, have become accepted the norms of the new Orthographic Agreement from October, 2008 and these have become preferred in all documentation pages of the project and the titles of articles since January, 2009, however, was maintained the liberty of each one use any possible orthographic norms. The next steps in the adoption of the new orthography will be discussed in august and September of the this year.

All the text of Wikipedia is published under the free licenses Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 and GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL), what permit the collaborators to add and to modify the work of the other, based in the principle known as "copyleft". This means that these licenses give to third, rights to modify and reuse the Wikipedia entries while they give it to others.

Any person can register in Wikipedia and thus choose a username to identify and be identified by the other wikipedians, how the frequent editors in Wikipedia call themselves. These wikipedians form a volunteers community, that exchange messages between them and help each other in the preparation of articles, review and evaluation. A beginner editor can opt to go through a tutoring program, during which a experienced user helps him to get acquainted with Wikipedia and its policies, at the same time he integrates into the community and learns the best way to create and edit entries.

The Wikimedia Foundation also hosts other projects beyond the Wikipedias, as Wiktionary (a dictionary and synonyms glossary pt.wiktionary.org), Wikiquote (a collection of famous quotes in wikiquote.org), Wikibooks (an aggregate of manuals and textbooks produced collaboratively in pt.wikibooks.org), Wikisource (a library in public domain in pt.wikisource.org) and Wikinews (news in real time pt.wikinews.org). All these projects are published under the same license. The Wikimedia Foundation supports itself from donations.