[Foundation-l] Promoting non-en Wikipedias (was In defence of Google)

Mon Jan 22 15:04:24 UTC 2007

2007/1/22, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se>:

> Users from Greece could visit Estonia to meet some wikipedians
> there and see how they are dealing with the problems of being a
> small nation.

To get a comparison, here are for a large number of languages the number of
native speakers (in millions, according to [[en:List of languages by number
of native speakers]] where possible, from the en: page on the language
otherwise) and the number of contributors in November 2006, according to the
wikistats. Included are languages with either 20 million or more speakers,
or 20 or more contributors. Ordering is by "contributors per million native
speakers. Not included are Latin, Nynorsk and Simple English, and for
Esperanto and Indonesian total speakers instead of first language speakers
have been used. For each language there is millions of speakers - number of
contributors - contributors per million speakers. The Scandinavian languages
seem to be the ones that attract the most people to Wikipedia, with Finnish
on top with about one in every 6000 Fins apparently being a Wikipedia
contributor (Asturian scores even higher, but the language is so small that
it must be considered a statistical anomaly). Least Wikipedia
contributorship is present in languages of India, with Punjabi (100 million
speakers, no Wikipedians) at the bottom.

ast: Asturian 0.1 - 20 - 200
fi: Finnish 5.4 - 936 - 173.3
no: Norse 4.7 - 639 - 136.0 (speakers includes nn: Nynorsk as well)
is: Icelandic 0.3 - 40 - 133.3
en: English 354 - 44000 - 124.3 (number of contributors estimated)
eo: Esperanto 1.05 - 118 - 112.4 (second language speakers)
lb: Luxembourgish 0.3 - 31 - 103.3
sv: Swedish 9 - 924 - 102.7
he: Hebrew 7 - 601 - 85.9
et: Estonian 1.08 - 92 - 85.2
de: German 101 - 7549 - 74.7
nl: Dutch 25 - 1652 - 66.1
eu: Basque 0.7 - 45 - 64.3
fr: French 67 - 3948 - 58.9
sl: Slovenian 2.0 - 114 - 57.0
ga: Irish 0.38 - 21 - 55.3
da: Danish 5.6 - 276 - 49.3
br: Breton 0.85 - 38 - 44.7
cy: Welsh 0.75 - 28 - 37.3
lt: Lithuanian 3.1 - 113 - 36.5
cs: Czech 12 - 433 - 36.1
pl: Polish 46 - 1597 - 34.7
it: Italian 61 - 2017 - 33.1
ja: Japanese 128 - 3842 - 29.9
sk: Slovak 5.0 - 148 - 29.6
ca: Catalan 6.7 - 195 - 29.1
mk: Macedonian 1.6 - 44 - 27.5
lv: Latvian 1.5 - 38 - 25.3
hu: Hungarian 14 - 354 - 25.3
bg: Bulgarian 7.6 - 188 - 24.7
gl: Galician 3.2 - 68 - 21.3
sh: Serbocratian 17 - 150 - 18.6 (number of contributors gathered by adding
up sr:, hr: and bs:)
el: Greek 12 - 132 - 11.0
oc: Occitan 1.94 - 21 - 10.8
ru: Russian 145 - 1164 - 8.0
ro: Romanian 24 - 192 - 8.0
es: Spanish 350 - 2600 - 7.4
yi: Yiddish 3.2 - 23 - 7.2
tr: Turkish 60 - 420 - 7.0
ka: Georgian 4.2 - 26 - 6.2
th: Thai 31 - 142 - 4.6
pt: Portuguese 203 - 1323 - 4.4
af: Afrikaans 6.0 - 25 - 4.2
sq: Albanian 6.0 - 24 - 4.0
uk: Ukrainian 39 - 131 - 3.4
be: Belorussian 9.1 - 30 - 3.3
ms: Malay 18 - 58 - 3.2
als: Alemannic 10 - 29 - 2.9
zh: Chinese 700 - 1527 - 2.2
ko: Korean 71 - 150 - 2.1
fa: Farsi 75 - 139 - 1.85
vi: Vietnamese 70 - 116 - 1.66
tl: Tagalog 22 - 24 - 1.09
id: Indonesian 200 - 151 - 0.76 (second language speakers)
ar: Arabic 270 - 177 - 0.66
ml: Malayalam 37 - 24 - 0.65
az: Azeri 30 - 18 - 0.60
ta: Tamil 62 - 34 - 0.55
te: Telugu 76 - 39 - 0.51
uz: Uzbek 20 - 10 - 0.50
su: Sundanese 27 - 12 - 0.44
mr: Maratha 68 - 28 - 0.41
zh-yue: Kantonese 71 - 29 - 0.41
kn: Kannada 55 - 20 - 0.36
ur: Urdu 61 - 16 - 0.26
ps: Pashto 24 - 4 - 0.17
bn: Bengali 196 - 29 - 0.15
sd: Sindhi 20 - 2 - 0.10
jv: Javanese 75 - 7 - 0.09
hi: Hindi 337 - 26 - 0.08
or: Oriya 24 - 1 - 0.04
am: Amharic 27 - 1 - 0.04
gu: Gujarati 46 - 1 - 0.02
ha: Hausa 24 - 0 - 0
om: Omoro 32 - 0 - 0
my: Burmese 32 - 0 - 0
pa: Punjabi 104 - 0 - 0

-- 
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels