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

Wed Mar 29 23:29:36 UTC 2006

Mark Williamson wrote:

> This still raises some questions; for example the Catalan WP has over
> 20k articles while the Arabic WP has just over 10k; numbers for
> Chinese, Spanish, and even Japanese (!) are similarly incongruent.

To write a wiki with 100K articles, you don't need the 480M 
speakers of Hindi, the 46M speakers of Polish or the 4.6M speakers 
of Norwegian.  All you need is 20 or 50 very determined people, 
who really want to write a wiki with 100K articles. This 
determination is a mindset, which can be very hard to reach.  
Have you tried to convince your parents to contribute actively to 
Wikipedia?  I suppose that pyramid schemes, religious cults, and 
even suicide bombings need a similar mindset.  Most people just 
wouldn't get it into their head, that this is a good idea.  But 
once you are determined, the actual job is not so hard to do.

Perhaps we have an understanding of ideas, ideologies, and 
mindsets today that is similar to the medical understanding of 
viruses and bacteria 200 years ago.

-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se