On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 4:36 PM, Richard Symonds < richard.symonds@wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:
it's a good starting point. But rather than a "top" list, perhaps we should be looking at "number of editors/number of speakers"?
We (well, some of us, I guess), have indeed been looking at that figure (one might call it "editorship penetration", as in "Internet penetration"). Erik Zachte's stats site helpfully provides that metric in the "summary" view for a language. E.g. Bulgarian Wikipedia has 20 editors-per-million speakers[1], German has 31[2], Hebrew has 147[3], and Waray has 4[4]. Other useful, robust figures are the aforementioned active editor count (and very-active editor count).
Speaking at least for the Community Resources (formerly Grantmaking) team at WMF, I can say we have been paying a lot more attention to these figures than to article counts.
A.
[1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryBG.htm [2] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryDE.htm [3] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryHE.htm [4] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryWAR.htm