Hoi, Apparently you are not aware that the Bengali Wikipedia is the biggest resource in Bengali on the Internet. As a consequence it is a big success !! Sure there should be more articles and we would absolutely welcome more articles, more readers more positive attention for the Bengali Wikipedia.
One other way of looking at it is the quality of the technical support for Bengali. I think I remember that there are issues with the Bengali script. I also think I remember that there was no solution forth coming. If I remember well, I would argue that that despite the odds the Bengali language Wikipedia is doing really well. Thanks, GerardM
2009/8/20 Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com
Personally, I think the 20000 articles in the Bengali Wikipedia serving a speaking community of 230 million is an even better example of failure.
-Robert Rohde
On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 8:22 PM, Lars Aronssonlars@aronsson.se wrote:
Andrew Gray wrote:
For those curious as to overall statistics, that's about 270 language editions of Wikipedia, now. (The various lists seem to disagree slightly, and it's a little lower if we omit two "empty" projects).
I think we need to get away from counting articles and languages, as if all were equal and more were better. Some languages are far more successful than others. Some articles are far more useful than others. Perhaps some languages and articles should be considered as failures and not be counted among our achievements.
Of these 270 languages of Wikipedia, only 41 have more than 50,000 articles and only 69 had more than 1 million page views in July of 2009. The 69th most used Wikipedia is Swahili. This East African language has 50 million speakers, which is huge, but less than 13,000 Wikipedia articles. Can poverty and illiteracy alone explain why the Swahili Wikipedia is so far behind?
But Swahili is far from the worst. Swahili has twice as many speakers as the West African language Yoruba (50 vs 25 M, both are huge languages) and twice the number of articles (13 k vs 6.3 k), but the Swahili Wikipedia had 6 times as many page views (1.0 M vs 172 k). Somebody with knowledge of Africa should study this in more detail. For the speakers of these languages, in which proportions do they read (newspapers) or listen (to radio broadcasts) to get news and knowledge? Do they ever use (printed) encyclopedias?
People who speak Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Norwegian are very similar in wealth, education, living conditions, and computer literacy. Yet, the Danish Wikipedia is far smaller and less visited than the other three. How can that be? Traditionally, Danish is the more literate of these four cultures. If we can find out what holds the Danish Wikipedia back, and find a remedy, perhaps it can be applied to other languages as well.
Language Danish Norwegian Swedish Finnish (Bokmål) Speakers 6 M 4.7 M 9 M 6 M Size rank 102 111 78 103
Wikipedia articles 114 k 225 k 325 k 213 k Size rank 23 13 11 14
July 2009 page views 14.7 M 21.5 M 59.8 M 49.7 M Traffic rank 25 23 12 14 Annual growth +18 % +11 % +19 % +2 %
Views/speakers 2.4 4.6 6.6 8.3 Articles/spkr .019 .047 .036 .036 Spkrs/article 53 21 28 28
Length of article on Michael Jackson before his death 18 kB 20 kB 41 kB 20 kB Current length 70 kB 26 kB 60 kB 44 kB Views in July 72 k 58 k 175 k 136 k Views/speaker .012 .012 .019 .022
When compared to Swahili or Yoruba, all of these North European languages of Wikipedia have been very successful, having more page views in a month than speakers of the language, and much higher traffic rank (12-25) than language size rank (78-111). But the interesting aspect is the differences within such a group, that presumably should have been even more homogeneous.
The German language has 105 M speakers, 942 k Wikipedia articles, and 846 M page views in July 2009, i.e. 8.0 views/speaker (as high as Finnish), but only .009 articles per speaker of the language (half of Danish). The German Wikipedia is generally considered to be successful, yet it has a low number of articles per speaker of the language. So maybe articles/speaker is a useless metric.
If the Finnish Wikipedia can get 8.3 page views per speaker of the language with only 213 k articles, then perhaps their articles are better (more informative, more useful) than the larger number of articles in the Swedish Wikipedia, which only attract 6.6 page views per speaker of the language.
The German article on Michael Jackson got 2.1 M page views during July, or .020 per speaker of the language, similar to the Swedish and Finnish Wikipedia articles. Why did the Danish and Norwegian articles get only 12 page views per thousand speakers?
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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