(And yes, I know that Language planning and some of the other items are not
measurable as numbers. I'm throwing ideas around.)
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2015-01-25 17:57 GMT-08:00 Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il>il>:
Hi,
It is well-known that the size of a Wikipedia in a given language is not
proportional to the number of people who speak that language. By "size" I
mean the article count and the active editor count.
This begs the question: Is it proportional to anything else?
I can think of a bunch of possible things (to most items you can add "...
in the countries where this language is spoken"):
* Penetration of Internet access
* Quality of education
* Number of people who know other major languages, such as English,
French, Russian, Spanish, etc.
* Number of people who *don't* know other major languages
* Gross domestic product
* Human Development Index
* The level of usage of this language in the education system (in some
countries schools function in foreign languages)
* Amount of published literature in that language
* Level of censorship and press freedom
* [[Language planning]] policies (think Catalonia, Ukraine, Quebec, Israel)
It is quite possible that the size of a Wikipedia is proportional not to
one of these things, but to a combination of them. It is also possible that
it is not proportional to any of the above, or to anything at all.
Did anybody ever try to research this?
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore