On 17 March 2016 at 19:40, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
One of the drawbacks is that we can't report on a single total number across all our projects.
Hmm. That's unfortunate for understanding reach -- if nothing else, the idea that "half a billion people access Wikipedia" (eg from earlier comscore reports) was a PR-friendly way of giving an idea of the scale of our readership. But I can see why it would be tricky to measure. Since this is the research list: I suspect there's still lots to be done in understanding just how multilingual people use different language editions of Wikipedia, too.
Building on this question a little: with the information we currently have, is it actively *wrong* for us to keep using the "half a billion" figure as a very rough first-order estimate? (Like Phoebe, I think I keep trotting it out when giving talks). Do the new figures give us reason to think it's substantially higher or lower than that, or even not meaningfully answerable?