Viquipèdia has reached 500,000 articles, a milestone of free knowledge in Catalan. The Catalan version of Wikipedia is one of 17 that have surpassed a half million articles, ahead of, for instance, the Arabic version.



Article number 500,000, on Norwegian painter Oda Krohg, was published by user Tiputini at 9:38 am last Friday, after a campaign to speed up the publication of articles and reach the half million mark coinciding with the 15th anniversary.



To achieve this milestone, the Amical (Friends of) Wikimedia and Viquipèdia itself have promoted various campaigns, such as Viquiprojecte Unió Europea, an exchange of new articles, "Xucladors" (copying open source content), "Missing articles", and "Requested articles". The hashtag #repte500mil was created to share user creations on Twitter and Facebook.



One of those who participated most on Twitter to increase the production of articles was writer Quim Monzó, who did so in his own unique style.



The Catalan version of Wikipedia was the second to publish an article after the English version. Technically it was created before the German version, but it remained dormant, without any articles. On March 17, 2001, an anonymous user wrote the entry for "àbac"(“abacus”), the very first one.



Catalan.wikipedia.com was the first domain name of the Catalan edition. It went through several versions, until two years later it adopted the Catalanized name Viquipèdia.



The Catalan edition has more than 30 million visits per month, according to its promoters. In 2014, Amical Wikimedia received Catalonia’s National Culture Award. On March 8, 2003 it reached 1,000 articles, and in February of the following year it had 5,000. On November 16, 2004 it reached 10,000. On January 4, 2007 it had 50,000 articles; on January 18, 2008, 100,000; on June 29, 2010 it hit the 250,000 mark, and on April 12, 2013 it reached 400,000 articles.



Viquipèdia was the first of the editions to be considered "perfect", a designation that recognizes that it had completed the 1,000 quality articles that an encyclopedia must have. That was in 2013 and it hasn’t stopped growing since.