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

Wed Mar 29 08:21:07 UTC 2006

I suppose there is no such thing as a single explanation. Some editions may
have an approach problem, that is, they may not be good enough in marketing
themselves. Other may stumble against a local tradition in which a written
word is a law, so people read and believes, rather than editing and
adding/discussing content. Cultures are very different. Besides, most people
who can properly use a wiki will also look for an english version in the
first place, and only eventually access a local variant. Too bad these are
also the guys who can mostly use an editor.

IMHO, edition lacking partecipation should better focus on their work with
children, who are quicker into adopting technologies. The wiki generation
had time enough to grow up in many language spaces, but is only being born
in many others. Instead of looking for a quick rise in rating, I'd rather
advice people to build solid grounds for the future.

Bèrto

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Williamson" <node.ue at gmail.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 5:18 AM
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Language versions' popularity vs. number of
articles(vs. number of speakers)

> 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
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