Simple English Wikipedia is the second version of Wikipedia in English, which was created to facilitate reading to children, people who are learning the language or people who are difficult to read or learn, or who might find it difficult to understand certain terms or articles of the main encyclopedia. That is why they use only easy words of that language, since they are supposed to be the most common 1000 of English.
When the Wikipedia in simple English began in 2003, Wikipedia in English already had 150 000 articles, while 7 other Wikipedias had more than 15 000 articles. Since the other Wikipedias already have so many articles, most articles in simple English take articles from other Wikipedias and make them easy to understand, usually not new.
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