Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Praises Catalan Viquipèdia · Global Voices
Violeta Camarasa

Jimmy Wales speaking at the Open Science conference on October 24, 2013. Credit: VUBrussel.
During the Open Science conference at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium on October 24, 2013, Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales highlighted Viquipèdia, the Catalan Wikipedia, as a success story. A video on YouTube features the moment when Wales talks about Viquipèdia (transcript by Viquipèdia editor Arnau Duran):
“…in some of our small language Wikipedias, we have very active communities, and there’s maybe only a few people there, but they are very passionate about their mother tongue, and they really want to do the work, and so they work really hard. If we have a look some of the larger minor languages of Europe, like Catalan is a good example. Catalan Wikipedia is far larger than you would have guessed from the number of people who are speaking Catalan. And it is because the Catalan people are quite passionate about their language, which has been historically under threat.”
Earlier this year, Viquipèdia reached the milestone of 400,000 articles, and the Amical Wikimedia, the association that promotes Viquipedia, got a chapter of its own, thus becoming the first Wikimedia chapter of a territory which does not correspond to a state.