The Urdu Wikipedia (Urdu: اردو ویکیپیڈیا), started in January 2004, is the Standard Urdu-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, open-content encyclopedia.[1][2] As of 21 December 2024, it has 215,803 articles, 188,258 registered users and 7,439 files, and it is the 54th largest edition of Wikipedia by article count, and ranks 20th in terms of depth among Wikipedias with over 150,000 articles.[3] There were 6 million page views in January 2024.[4] On 7 January 2024, the Urdu Wikipedia became the first South Asian-language Wikipedia to surpass 200,000 articles.
History
Wikipedia started being multilingual in May 2001. At first, Urdu Wikipedia faced technical problems with the Urdu script font, but now this matter is mostly settled; some unsolved areas remain. Urdu is written in Perso-Arabic script, a right-to-left writing system. As a result, users sometimes need to configure their operating systems and web browsers accordingly.
Currently, Urdu Wikipedia uses the "Urdu Naskh Asiatype" font, which was introduced and is freely distributed by the BBC at BBC Urdu Service website.[5] The font is primarily used for article bodies and headings. Urdu variation of Times New Roman is used for navigation links. Both of these fonts are variations of Naskh style. Some Pakistani variations of complex Nasta'liq script are also supported only as a secondary choice in class definitions of CSS, i.e. if default font is not found on client system, then Nasta'liq script is used. The translation of the Wikipedia interface and project information pages into Urdu is still in progress. Some pages about how to edit have been translated.
In January 2016, Urdu Wikipedia ranked first in the number of articles as compared to other Indian languages.[6] In India, Urdu Wikipedia activities are hosted and promoted by the Dehalvi Wikimedia User Group. The group hosted its first educational program in Deoband in February 2020.[7] Urdu is the second most popular Wikipedia in Pakistan, behind English. It receives approximately 2 million pageviews in the country, and around 610 thousand in India as of November 2022.[8]
Urdu Wikipedia has approximately 320 contributors per month. Most users are from Pakistan, although there are many users from India as well. There are also notable users from Saudi Arabia.[11] Much like the rest of Indic languages, Urdu suffers from an acute shortage of contributors due to various reasons. Ahmed Nisar, a contributor to Urdu Wikipedia from India, claims that some of the reasons are the preference of the people for English-language media, as well as the lack of Urdu-speaking experts which are well versed in various aspects of current affairs.[12]
