[Wikipedia-l] Mediametry survey (was )Re: Language versions' popularity vs. number of articles...)

Wed Mar 29 08:51:24 UTC 2006

Mark Williamson wrote:
> 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)

Hi

By the way, I have wondered for a long time how it could be that the 
french wikipedia be the third largest (which is a fact)... and only 
supposingly 2% of the visits. I also remember that meta had very 
significantly more visits than the french wikipedia. Which.. to me... is 
not something I *believe*.

Answer : these values are collected strictly thanks to the use of the 
Alexa bar...; which is apparently very little used at least in France. 
Hence possibly messing up the statistics. It might well be the same for 
other languages, in particular those for which the Alexa bar... is 
simply not working/translated. So... be careful with the use of the 
Alexa data. They are a very interesting feedback... but also to take 
with a pinch of salt.

By the way, there was recently a study by Mediametry (a statistical 
agency, making polls. In France, probably the largest and most famous one).

The study showed this

	déc. 2004	avr. 2005	août 2005	déc. 2005
USA	4 544 000	6 753 000	11 874 000	17 498 000
Germany	1 707 000	2 956 000	4 502 000	5 529 000
France	681 000		1 169 000	1 429 000	2 421 000
UK	540 000		766 000		1 525 000	2 298 000

Please see that : 
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mediametrie+wikipedia&btnG=Google+Search

anthere