Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
Personally I think this is a very interesting point.
You will
forgive if I have asked this before, and not gotten a reply.
(I honestly forget if I have broached this subject before, I
know I have often thought I should ask the question.)
Does anyone know how many unique (that is not reproduced
around other languages) articles there are in toto in the
non-English language wikipedias, which do not have a
corresponding English language wikipedia article? Can
even a rough estimate be made?
On the basis of clicking "Zufälliger Artikel" 50 times, it looks to me
like around 50% of deWP articles do not have interwiki to enWP. Only a
small proportion of those without such interwiki look like they should
have a corresponding article in enWP. The proportion with interwiki but
no English interwiki is not huge - say 25%? This is not a very
sophisticated technique from a statistical point of view, but it could
be refined to get a better view by sampling of the overlapping of the
Wikipedias. It all suggests the answer to the question is "around one
million" - not 500000 (too low), not two million (maybe too high?).
Charles