2009/9/23 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>om>:
The reason "how we have not reached large parts
of the world yet" is
because access to Wikipedia is significantly influenced by things
outside of Wikimedia's control and scope.
A dramatic demonstration of this: if someone in Beijing flips a switch
tomorrow, and zh.wp becomes blocked, our potential audience changes by
three hundred million (internet users) or a billion (speakers)
overnight (depending if you count population or internet users) and
our nominal penetration among Chinese-speakers would presumably
collapse as a result.
Surely someone must have a respectable count of
internet users by
language that we could use for comparison? That would be a much better
metric for our success today; while raw literate speaker numbers would
be a useful comparison for what we could start reaching with
non-internet mechanisms.
There's a couple of estimates on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage
though they look a little dated.
Alternatively, users by country is reasonably well estimated, I think,
and you could try estimating based on languages from that.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk