Delirium wrote:
English has around 350 million native speakers, and over 1.5 billion total speakers; Greek has fewer than 15 million total speakers. To overcome that disparity in number of speakers requires a *huge* popularity among the speakers who do exist.
This problem does exist, but the limit is not drawn anywhere near 15 million speakers. Languages with 15,000 speakers *do* have a problem. Faroese with 45,000 speakers (2124 articles) and Icelandic with 300,000 speakers (12,955 articles) have a slow start. Estonian with 1.5 million speakers is doing just fine (29,240 articles). All of these languages/countries (including Greece) are part of the western, (post-)industrial, wealthy, free world, so they do not have the handicap of poverty, illiteracy or censorship.
Users from Greece could visit Estonia to meet some wikipedians there and see how they are dealing with the problems of being a small nation. However, each nation tends to look only to their bigger neighbors (Germany, France, USA) and not the smaller ones.