[2] It is the 9th-largest Wikipedia by the number of articles (after the English, Swedish, German, Dutch, French, Cebuano, Russian, and Spanish editions).

The first pages (circa five hundred) were simply untranslated copies from the English-language Wikipedia; the first edits were made from 11 June 2001, onwards.

The edits were not numerous, and the priority was initially given to helping Nupedia; the lemmas were just twenty or thirty, and there were about ten users.

With the end of the Nupedia project, the situation began to improve for the Italian Wikipedia: users started to sign in, and the functions of administrators and semi-protection were implemented.

From 4 to 6 October 2011, following a decision adopted by volunteers of the Italian Wikipedia community, a knowledge blackout was in place.

Today, unfortunately, the very pillars on which Wikipedia has been built—neutrality, freedom, and verifiability of its contents—are likely to be heavily compromised by paragraph 29 of a law proposal, also known as "DDL intercettazioni" (Wiretapping Act).

This proposal, which the Italian Parliament is currently debating, provides, among other things, a requirement to all websites to publish, within 48 hours of the request and without any comment, a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image.

Hence, anyone who feels offended by any content published on a blog, an online newspaper and, most likely, even on Wikipedia would have the right for a statement ("correction") to be shown, unaltered, on the page, aimed to contradict and disprove the allegedly harmful contents, regardless of the truthfulness of the information deemed as offensive, and its sources.The bill allowed for a fine of between €9,500 and €12,000.

[14][15][16] The Wikimedia Foundation officially supported the decision of the Italian Wikipedia by a statement released the same day.

[11] As of 5 October 2011[update] the manifesto, which replaced the Italian Wikipedia, had been viewed approximately 8 million times.

[17] On 6 October 2011, the website content was restored, with a banner across the top of each page explaining the reason for the protest.