Started in June 2003, it is moderately active and as of February 2025, it has 33,382 articles with 134 active users.

[1][2] It is the twelfth-most popular Wikipedia in the Indian subcontinent.

[3] The Kannada Wikipedia community held a meeting in Bangalore on 2 April 2006, which got fairly high press coverage.

As of January 2016, the Kannada Wikipedia is the tenth-largest Indian-language Wikipedia, behind Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, and Punjabi.

Administrator Omshivaprakash attributes the lack of articles to a lack of interest among the Kannada-speaking community, a lack of awareness of the Kannada Wikipedia and Kannada typing tools, and limited Internet access in parts of Karnataka.