Andrew Gray wrote:
> For those curious as to overall statistics, that's about 270 language
> editions of Wikipedia, now. (The various lists seem to disagree
> slightly, and it's a little lower if we omit two "empty" projects).
I think we need to get away from counting articles and languages,
as if all were equal and more were better. Some languages are far
more successful than others. Some articles are far more useful
than others. Perhaps some languages and articles should be
considered as failures and not be counted among our achievements.
Of these 270 languages of Wikipedia, only 41 have more than 50,000
articles and only 69 had more than 1 million page views in July of
2009. The 69th most used Wikipedia is Swahili. This East African
language has 50 million speakers, which is huge, but less than
13,000 Wikipedia articles. Can poverty and illiteracy alone
explain why the Swahili Wikipedia is so far behind?
But Swahili is far from the worst. Swahili has twice as many
speakers as the West African language Yoruba (50 vs 25 M, both are
huge languages) and twice the number of articles (13 k vs 6.3 k),
but the Swahili Wikipedia had 6 times as many page views (1.0 M vs
172 k). Somebody with knowledge of Africa should study this in
more detail. For the speakers of these languages, in which
proportions do they read (newspapers) or listen (to radio
broadcasts) to get news and knowledge? Do they ever use (printed)
encyclopedias?
People who speak Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Norwegian are very
similar in wealth, education, living conditions, and computer
literacy. Yet, the Danish Wikipedia is far smaller and less
visited than the other three. How can that be? Traditionally,
Danish is the more literate of these four cultures. If we can find
out what holds the Danish Wikipedia back, and find a remedy,
perhaps it can be applied to other languages as well.
Language Danish Norwegian Swedish Finnish
(Bokmål)
Speakers 6 M 4.7 M 9 M 6 M
Size rank 102 111 78 103
Wikipedia
articles 114 k 225 k 325 k 213 k
Size rank 23 13 11 14
July 2009
page views 14.7 M 21.5 M 59.8 M 49.7 M
Traffic rank 25 23 12 14
Annual growth +18 % +11 % +19 % +2 %
Views/speakers 2.4 4.6 6.6 8.3
Articles/spkr .019 .047 .036 .036
Spkrs/article 53 21 28 28
Length of article on Michael Jackson
before his death 18 kB 20 kB 41 kB 20 kB
Current length 70 kB 26 kB 60 kB 44 kB
Views in July 72 k 58 k 175 k 136 k
Views/speaker .012 .012 .019 .022
When compared to Swahili or Yoruba, all of these North European
languages of Wikipedia have been very successful, having more page
views in a month than speakers of the language, and much higher
traffic rank (12-25) than language size rank (78-111). But the
interesting aspect is the differences within such a group, that
presumably should have been even more homogeneous.
The German language has 105 M speakers, 942 k Wikipedia articles,
and 846 M page views in July 2009, i.e. 8.0 views/speaker (as high
as Finnish), but only .009 articles per speaker of the language
(half of Danish). The German Wikipedia is generally considered to
be successful, yet it has a low number of articles per speaker of
the language. So maybe articles/speaker is a useless metric.
If the Finnish Wikipedia can get 8.3 page views per speaker of the
language with only 213 k articles, then perhaps their articles are
better (more informative, more useful) than the larger number of
articles in the Swedish Wikipedia, which only attract 6.6 page
views per speaker of the language.
The German article on Michael Jackson got 2.1 M page views during
July, or .020 per speaker of the language, similar to the Swedish
and Finnish Wikipedia articles. Why did the Danish and Norwegian
articles get only 12 page views per thousand speakers?
--
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se _______________________________________________
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