>I asked this before, but I don't think anyone
replied.
>Is there anyway to see a list of articles based on in
>how many languages they're in? It would be interested
>to see which articles are the most international or
>the most important...
I am not sure if I understand the idea correct, but here are
my thoughts.
1.
There is perhaps no easy way to see the list. It takes a
well-developed wikitionary to find out how "United Nations,"
"Dog," or any other good candidate is spelled in all the
different languages.
We can use inter-language links, but they are not complete.
The only way is to build a list through a interlingual
collaborative research project.
It could be daunting, but the scope of the research could
be limited based on
a) the list of articles in smallerst wikis
and/or
b) to just a list of top 100 most-viewed
articles in each site.
2.
I have some guesses about which articles exist in the
greatest number of languages.
-Wikipedia might be existing in most sites.
-GNU_FDL, because it is linked from most pages, may be
as prevalent.
-Basic academic disciplines such as mathematics, linguistics,
and sociology, because they are likely to be linked from
main pages. Lists of world countries, languages, etc.
would be perhaps as popular.
While these are not unimportant subjects, they do not
represent "what's globally important" well. (I'm assuming
that's what Chuck wanted to observe.)
Beyond that, two types:
Some articles are placed in very inactive site because a
user wants to distribute an article multilingually. I
have seen at least two such articles in Japanese wiki
perhaps machine-translated. In its early stage, I guess,
users of a non-English wikipedia may be dominantly
bilinguals, non-native speakers, and etc. (Well, esperanto
wiki and maybe some others will always remain so. :-)
Then computer related topics would be popular because
of the demographics of early adopters.
With many wikis still in their infancies, those may turn
out to be the ultimate winners, scoring points from the
small-sized wikis.
But I'm not saying the idea of a list of articles based
on # of languages is uninteresting.
If we really construct one, something else may come up,
say, "Beatles" or "European Union," that would be
interesing. I'm curious, indeed.
I would be even more interested if different list exist for
people, country, artist, movie, novel, music, etc.
Did I answer your question? If my take is correct and
you will initiate an interlingual research project,
please let me know.
Tomos
_________________________________________________________________
MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus