[Wikipedia-l] Language versions' popularity vs. number of articles (vs. number of speakers)

Wed Mar 29 02:18:41 UTC 2006

Hi everybody,

While it's sort of obvious, given the digital divide, that the number
of articles in Wikipedias is not proportional to the number of
speakers, for example Hindi has a much smaller number of articles
compared to speakers than most active Wikipedias; German has more.

However, something that people may not notice as much is the
incongruency between popularity of a particular language version and
the number of articles in that version.

The most visited Wikipedias, in order, are:

1 English (65%)
2 German (10%)
3 Japanese (6%)
4 Spanish (3%)
5 French (2%)
6 Polish (2%)
7 Chinese (2%)
8 Arabic (2%)
9 Italian (1%)
10 Hebrew (1%)
11 Turkish (1%)
12 Dutch (1%)
13 Portuguese (1%)
(all others combined total 1% of visits)

On the other hand, the list of Wikipedias ranked by number of articles is:
1 English (1048.7K)
2 German (376.9K)
3 French (261.1K)
4 Polish (223.8K)
5 Japanese (196.3K)
6 Dutch (156.9K)
...
8 Italian (146.8K)
9 Portuguese (123.8K)
10 Spanish (105.0K)
...
12 Chinese (61.48K)
...
17 Hebrew (34.35K)
...
29 Turkish (19.94K)
...
37 Arabic (12.03K)

What this says to me is that these Wikipedias are not attracting new
pages proportional to views when compared with other Wikipedias. This
may be because people don't want to write new pages, but it seems to
me more likely that people simply don't know they can.

How can this be fixed? Perhaps a site notice inviting people to write
quality pages or register, or a drive to recruit new Wikipedians from
the academic community.

Mark

--
"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin