Cebuano Wikipedia

It is the largest Philippine-language Wikipedia by number of articles, ahead of Waray Wikipedia and Tagalog Wikipedia (which as of 3 May 2026 have 1,266,897 and 49,049 articles respectively).^[1]

Cebuano is the second most spoken language in the Philippines with about 20 million speakers.^[2] The Cebuano-language Wikipedia community has claimed to be the only online encyclopedia in this language.^[3]

However, Cebuano Wikipedia does not appear to be widely used in the Philippines; as of March 2021,^[update] 90 percent of Wikipedia views from that country were directed at English Wikipedia, with 5 percent going to Tagalog and 3 percent to Russian Wikipedia.^[4] About 30 percent of Cebuano Wikipedia views come from China, 22 percent from the United States, and only about 11 percent from the Philippines (roughly the same number as from France).^[5] Most of the articles on the Wikipedia are not relevant to Cebuano speakers.^[6]

The Cebuano-language Wikipedia was launched in June 2005.^[7] In January 2006, 1,000 articles were created,^[8] while in November 2006 there were 1,400 articles.^[9] At the end of 2006 and 2007, the bots created ten thousand articles on municipalities in France.^[10]

By the end of 2012, the number of articles increased to about 30,000. In December 2012, Lsjbot began to create articles. As a result, the number of articles increased dramatically in 2013, and from February to December 2013, the number of articles increased ninefold.^[11][12] By the end of 2015, about 99 percent of the then 1.4 million articles had been created by bots, including about 25,000 articles about localities and the rest of articles about living beings by Lsjbot.^[10] Sverker Johansson, the creator of Lsjbot, focused on the Cebuano Wikipedia as his wife is a native Cebuano speaker; Johansson himself is not fluent in the language.^[6]

On 16 July 2014, the Cebuano-language Wikipedia comprised one million articles, making it the 12th-largest Wikipedia. After overtaking Spanish-, Italian-, Russian-, French-, Dutch- and German-speaking Wikipedia within a year and a half, in February 2016 it reached the two-million mark. After about half a year, followed by the third million, and another half a year later, the fourth million. In August 2017, the five millionth article was created, and it became the second largest Wikipedia.

Many of the bot-created pages were found to have grammatical or factual errors, and due to the low ratio of human editors to articles, articles are not maintained or improved often. A 2018 proposal to delete the entire Wikipedia and start over received little support.^[6] One editor claimed that the quality of other Philippine language Wikipedias was dragged down, as they started competing on quantity with the Cebuano Wikipedia.^[6]

• 
  The number of articles in Cebuano Wikipedia^[11]
• 
  New articles by user groups, bots in blue^[11]
• 
  Typical automated article by Lsjbot

An analysis of Cebuano Wikipedia content on Wikidata in July 2015 showed that of the then 1.21 million articles, 95.8 percent are on living beings and biological species (1,160,787) and 3.3 percent are cities and communities (39,420).^[18]