On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 2:18 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
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?).
Does anyone know the answer to the opposite question? How many articles on the English Wikipedia lack interwiki links? It is possible (but less likely) that the articles exist in both places, but haven't been linked with an interwiki yet. I find examples of that fairly regularly, but am not sure how common it is.
Carcharoth