Hi Piotr,

I would look into things such as distribution (is there one region of the world Wikipedia is used more in general) and alternative projects (such as Chinese Baidu) that might be more popular for people speaking the language. And there might be some aspect to people living abroad editing their language Wikipedia, but that's just speculating. Somewhat along the lines, if people from language one move to places where language two is spoken, and language two has a big Wikipedia already, it might be a motivating factor to edit the other language more as well.

Best, Lucie

On 24 July 2018 at 09:02, Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:

Dear all,

I am working on a paper on why/whether people contribute (or not) to collective intelligence differently projects in different countries. The paper was inspired, partially, by several discussions I had with various people on why different language Wikipedia's have different sizes, besides (doh) the popularity of the language (and yes, English is biggest because it is international; and yes, I am aware a few Wikipedias are outliers because of bots creating machine translations or auto-populating villages or such). But for example, Poland and South Korea have roughly similar population/speakers and development status, yet Polish Wikipedia is over 3x the size of the SK one and no bot can account for that. So, there's more to that. I am already feeding dozens of parameters to a spreadsheet for some modelling, but I a) wonder what I might have missed - before a reviewer asks 'why didn't you check for xyz' and b) would like to have a few nice sentences about how things that people expect to matter do not (or vice versa). Hence, my question to you all, in the form of this open question mini survey:

Why do you think different language Wikipedia's have different sizes, outside of the popularity of a given language?

For reference, list of Wikipedias by size and language: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias

TIA!

-- Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus

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