Hi!
There's a little research project I've been working on in the last few
weeks: What are the articles that people are most often looking for in
their language, and *cannot* find?
I was doing this by looking at the logs of searches in the language search
box in the interlanguage links panel and counting the articles on which
searching for a language didn't yield any result.
This can be useful to the editors in different languages for understanding
which articles are in demand and should be created. This may also be useful
for considering how to reorganize existing articles. Of course, actually
doing this is up to the editing communities in each language; I'm just
trying to show where exactly does this happen.
My first attempt at producing a report about it can be found here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Most_wanted_articles_across_languages
This is my first attempt to make a public version of this report, so you
may find some issues there, for example contradicting or missing data.
Also, the tables could probably be more nicely designed. Bug reports,
suggestions for improvement, and all other feedback is obviously welcome.
However, I believe this is good enough for taking a first look and reaching
some conclusions.
The two immediate findings that I can see are that the most notable
articles that people cannot find fall into the following categories:
* Topics that are popular in the news: "Avengers: Infinity War", "General
Data Protection Regulation", "Avicii". In particular, I should note that
topics that are featured in Google Doodles [1] come up often: "Georges
Méliès", "Mahadevi Varma", etc.
* Topics that are covered in another language, but cannot be found because
of different organization of information. This often happens with articles
where there are cultural differences between languages, for example
"Football" in the English Wikipedia refers to several different games (I'd
guess that many people around the world are interested in "Association
Football"). This also often happens with articles about Biology and
species: "Homo Sapiens", "Blueberry", etc.; these are organized
differently
in different Wikipedias.
[1]
https://www.google.com/doodles/
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore