On March 16, 2001, Jimmy Wales announced that he wanted to create Wikipedias in other languages and mentioned that there was interest in creating a Catalan version.[6] The first tests were made on the deutsche.wikipedia.com,[7] and a few minutes later, the Catalan Wikipedia was created in the catalan.wikipedia.com domain.[8]
The first edit on a non-English Wikipedia was at 21:07 UTC, March 16, 2001, made to the Catalan main page. The first contribution in a non-English article dates from March 17 at 01:41 UTC in the article Àbac.[citation needed] Despite being created after the German Wikipedia, for about two months it was the only non-English Wikipedia that contained articles.[9]
After some time, the domain changed to ca.wikipedia.com and later to ca.wikipedia.org. About 2003 its community started to use the name "Viquipèdia" when talking about this edition of Wikipedia. Nowadays, this word is used in Catalan language to refer to the whole Wikipedia. About 2005, the domain www.viquipedia.net was registered and it redirects to ca.wikipedia.org. In 2007, www.viquipedia.cat was also registered and redirected.
The first registered user was probably AstroNomer, presumably used only to make some registration tests, but the first registered user to make lasting contributions was Cdani, the same user cited in Jimbo Wales' message.
In 2005 the Catalan Wikipedia community debated on which name(s) of the Catalan language to present in the main page and other policy pages, either català, "Catalan", valencià, "Valencian", or a combination of both català-valencià and català o valencià. Although there was not a consensus on any of the proposals, users agreed that in articles relevant to the Valencian Community, the name "Valencian" was to be used; on all other articles "Catalan" is preferred.[10] The main page avoids making reference to a particular nomenclature,[clarification needed] by simply stating aquesta versió, "this version".
