Inspired by the Wikimania thread, I decided to work out approximately how much traffic each language of Wikipedia gets. I totaled the top 1000 page views for February at http://stats.grok.se/ for each of the Wikipedia communities and arrived at the following list:
Language Page views % of Total
1 English 929238291 50.32% 2 German 188053798 10.18% 3 Japanese 174055663 9.43% 4 Spanish 112874582 6.11% 5 French 76874066 4.16% 6 Italian 58002665 3.14% 7 Polish 54562647 2.95% 8 Portuguese 38395679 2.08% 9 Russian 26100952 1.41% 10 Dutch 25549308 1.38% 11 Turkish 19850823 1.08% 12 Swedish 15511077 0.84% 13 Finnish 13913585 0.75% 14 Norwegian 8896989 0.48% 15 Chinese 8863799 0.48% 16 Hebrew 8567314 0.46% 17 Czech 7820169 0.42% 18 Arabic 6692037 0.36% 19 Indonesian 5794989 0.31% 20 Hungarian 5619172 0.30% 21 th 5072842 0.27% 22 da 4398916 0.24% 23 ro 4133216 0.22% 24 ko 3396611 0.18% 25 bg 3173471 0.17% 26 vi 3032979 0.16% 27 fa 2690333 0.15% 28 ca 2453214 0.13% 29 lt 2410434 0.13% 30 hr 2391348 0.13% 31 el 2286062 0.12% 32 ms 2119487 0.11% 33 sk 1873386 0.10% 34 sl 1753346 0.09% 35 simple 1614145 0.09% 36 et 1423607 0.08% 37 sr 1199822 0.06% 38 uk 1110578 0.06% 39 tl 1069871 0.06% 40 gl 923308 0.05% 41 lv 876243 0.05% 42 bs 828707 0.04% 43 eo 731760 0.04% 44 sq 648370 0.04% 45 eu 593362 0.03% 46 mk 572943 0.03% 47 ka 547997 0.03% 48 nn 539562 0.03% 49 te 475333 0.03% 50 la 447362 0.02% 51 is 411988 0.02% 52 sh 393023 0.02% 53 hi 382151 0.02% 54 ta 334968 0.02% 55 lb 316817 0.02% 56 ast 306507 0.02% 57 az 305324 0.02% 58 ku 297680 0.02% 59 cy 294459 0.02% 60 nds 283217 0.02% 61 br 282351 0.02% 62 bn 268771 0.01% 63 scn 255165 0.01% 64 io 240010 0.01% 65 mr 237498 0.01% 66 oc 229580 0.01% 67 bpy 216187 0.01% 68 su 215629 0.01% 69 jv 214303 0.01% 70 ceb 191102 0.01% 71 vo 184129 0.01% 72 nap 175261 0.01% 73 ht 168348 0.01% 74 pms 138040 0.01% 75 new 117181 0.01%
Assumming that the number of page views for the top 1000 pages is representative of the total count for all pages, it appears that English accounts for just over half all Wikipedia traffic at present. It also suggests that EN Wikipedia probably gets over 1 billion page views per month. ;-). It would be interesting to see pageviews per article if anyone wants to add in the article counts for each community.
-Robert Rohde
On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 1:35 PM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
Inspired by the Wikimania thread, I decided to work out approximately how much traffic each language of Wikipedia gets. I totaled the top 1000 page views for February at http://stats.grok.se/ for each of the Wikipedia communities and arrived at the following list:
One thing to keep in mind is that languages imply countries far less than people assume. There are quite a few languages where US readership is comparable to or larger than the obvious countries for that language.
Some old breakdown data:
http://myrandomnode.dyndns.org/wikipedia-viewer-matrix.html
The graph is log scale because otherwise you can pretty much only see the largest project and country.
Gregory Maxwell a écrit :
On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 1:35 PM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
Inspired by the Wikimania thread, I decided to work out approximately how much traffic each language of Wikipedia gets. I totaled the top 1000 page views for February at http://stats.grok.se/ for each of the Wikipedia communities and arrived at the following list:
One thing to keep in mind is that languages imply countries far less than people assume. There are quite a few languages where US readership is comparable to or larger than the obvious countries for that language.
Some old breakdown data:
http://myrandomnode.dyndns.org/wikipedia-viewer-matrix.html
The graph is log scale because otherwise you can pretty much only see the largest project and country.
I agree, butif english language is the first wikipedia because they are more native english speakers than in greek (for exemple). For exemple, I think if China people can have computers the zh wikipedia would be the most visited wiki. Vivelefrat
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On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 8:07 PM, remy.le.guen remy.le.guen@wanadoo.fr wrote:
Gregory Maxwell a écrit :
On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 1:35 PM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
Inspired by the Wikimania thread, I decided to work out approximately how much traffic each language of Wikipedia gets. I totaled the top 1000 page views for February at http://stats.grok.se/ for each of the Wikipedia communities and arrived at the following list:
One thing to keep in mind is that languages imply countries far less than people assume. There are quite a few languages where US readership is comparable to or larger than the obvious countries for that language.
Some old breakdown data:
http://myrandomnode.dyndns.org/wikipedia-viewer-matrix.html
The graph is log scale because otherwise you can pretty much only see the largest project and country.
I agree, butif english language is the first wikipedia because they are more native english speakers than in greek (for exemple). For exemple, I think if China people can have computers the zh wikipedia would be the most visited wiki. Vivelefrat
Not only that, but also many non-native speakers use the English Wikipedia. I know that here in certain areas the use of the English Wikipedia is equal or larger than that of the Dutch one.
Bryan
Thank you for the very interesting list. It is another useful list to compare Wikipedias, for my little study about Wikipedias in "weak" languages. Did you think about putting it on e.g. Meta Wiki? Ziko
2008/3/31, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com:
Inspired by the Wikimania thread, I decided to work out approximately how much traffic each language of Wikipedia gets. I totaled the top 1000 page views for February at http://stats.grok.se/ for each of the Wikipedia communities and arrived at the following list:
Language Page views % of Total
1 English 929238291 50.32% 2 German 188053798 10.18% 3 Japanese 174055663 9.43% 4 Spanish 112874582 6.11% 5 French 76874066 4.16% 6 Italian 58002665 3.14% 7 Polish 54562647 2.95% 8 Portuguese 38395679 2.08% 9 Russian 26100952 1.41% 10 Dutch 25549308 1.38% 11 Turkish 19850823 1.08% 12 Swedish 15511077 0.84% 13 Finnish 13913585 0.75% 14 Norwegian 8896989 0.48% 15 Chinese 8863799 0.48% 16 Hebrew 8567314 0.46% 17 Czech 7820169 0.42% 18 Arabic 6692037 0.36% 19 Indonesian 5794989 0.31% 20 Hungarian 5619172 0.30% 21 th 5072842 0.27% 22 da 4398916 0.24% 23 ro 4133216 0.22% 24 ko 3396611 0.18% 25 bg 3173471 0.17% 26 vi 3032979 0.16% 27 fa 2690333 0.15% 28 ca 2453214 0.13% 29 lt 2410434 0.13% 30 hr 2391348 0.13% 31 el 2286062 0.12% 32 ms 2119487 0.11% 33 sk 1873386 0.10% 34 sl 1753346 0.09% 35 simple 1614145 0.09% 36 et 1423607 0.08% 37 sr 1199822 0.06% 38 uk 1110578 0.06% 39 tl 1069871 0.06% 40 gl 923308 0.05% 41 lv 876243 0.05% 42 bs 828707 0.04% 43 eo 731760 0.04% 44 sq 648370 0.04% 45 eu 593362 0.03% 46 mk 572943 0.03% 47 ka 547997 0.03% 48 nn 539562 0.03% 49 te 475333 0.03% 50 la 447362 0.02% 51 is 411988 0.02% 52 sh 393023 0.02% 53 hi 382151 0.02% 54 ta 334968 0.02% 55 lb 316817 0.02% 56 ast 306507 0.02% 57 az 305324 0.02% 58 ku 297680 0.02% 59 cy 294459 0.02% 60 nds 283217 0.02% 61 br 282351 0.02% 62 bn 268771 0.01% 63 scn 255165 0.01% 64 io 240010 0.01% 65 mr 237498 0.01% 66 oc 229580 0.01% 67 bpy 216187 0.01% 68 su 215629 0.01% 69 jv 214303 0.01% 70 ceb 191102 0.01% 71 vo 184129 0.01% 72 nap 175261 0.01% 73 ht 168348 0.01% 74 pms 138040 0.01% 75 new 117181 0.01%
Assumming that the number of page views for the top 1000 pages is representative of the total count for all pages, it appears that English accounts for just over half all Wikipedia traffic at present. It also suggests that EN Wikipedia probably gets over 1 billion page views per month. ;-). It would be interesting to see pageviews per article if anyone wants to add in the article counts for each community.
-Robert Rohde _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Very interesting that even with censorship from the mainland, Zh.wp is in the top 20. Imagine where it would be if that censorship was gone. -Dan On Mar 31, 2008, at 2:34 PM, Ziko van Dijk wrote:
Thank you for the very interesting list. It is another useful list to compare Wikipedias, for my little study about Wikipedias in "weak" languages. Did you think about putting it on e.g. Meta Wiki? Ziko
2008/3/31, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com:
Inspired by the Wikimania thread, I decided to work out approximately how much traffic each language of Wikipedia gets. I totaled the top 1000 page views for February at http://stats.grok.se/ for each of the Wikipedia communities and arrived at the following list:
Language Page views % of Total
1 English 929238291 50.32% 2 German 188053798 10.18% 3 Japanese 174055663 9.43% 4 Spanish 112874582 6.11% 5 French 76874066 4.16% 6 Italian 58002665 3.14% 7 Polish 54562647 2.95% 8 Portuguese 38395679 2.08% 9 Russian 26100952 1.41% 10 Dutch 25549308 1.38% 11 Turkish 19850823 1.08% 12 Swedish 15511077 0.84% 13 Finnish 13913585 0.75% 14 Norwegian 8896989 0.48% 15 Chinese 8863799 0.48% 16 Hebrew 8567314 0.46% 17 Czech 7820169 0.42% 18 Arabic 6692037 0.36% 19 Indonesian 5794989 0.31% 20 Hungarian 5619172 0.30% 21 th 5072842 0.27% 22 da 4398916 0.24% 23 ro 4133216 0.22% 24 ko 3396611 0.18% 25 bg 3173471 0.17% 26 vi 3032979 0.16% 27 fa 2690333 0.15% 28 ca 2453214 0.13% 29 lt 2410434 0.13% 30 hr 2391348 0.13% 31 el 2286062 0.12% 32 ms 2119487 0.11% 33 sk 1873386 0.10% 34 sl 1753346 0.09% 35 simple 1614145 0.09% 36 et 1423607 0.08% 37 sr 1199822 0.06% 38 uk 1110578 0.06% 39 tl 1069871 0.06% 40 gl 923308 0.05% 41 lv 876243 0.05% 42 bs 828707 0.04% 43 eo 731760 0.04% 44 sq 648370 0.04% 45 eu 593362 0.03% 46 mk 572943 0.03% 47 ka 547997 0.03% 48 nn 539562 0.03% 49 te 475333 0.03% 50 la 447362 0.02% 51 is 411988 0.02% 52 sh 393023 0.02% 53 hi 382151 0.02% 54 ta 334968 0.02% 55 lb 316817 0.02% 56 ast 306507 0.02% 57 az 305324 0.02% 58 ku 297680 0.02% 59 cy 294459 0.02% 60 nds 283217 0.02% 61 br 282351 0.02% 62 bn 268771 0.01% 63 scn 255165 0.01% 64 io 240010 0.01% 65 mr 237498 0.01% 66 oc 229580 0.01% 67 bpy 216187 0.01% 68 su 215629 0.01% 69 jv 214303 0.01% 70 ceb 191102 0.01% 71 vo 184129 0.01% 72 nap 175261 0.01% 73 ht 168348 0.01% 74 pms 138040 0.01% 75 new 117181 0.01%
Assumming that the number of page views for the top 1000 pages is representative of the total count for all pages, it appears that English accounts for just over half all Wikipedia traffic at present. It also suggests that EN Wikipedia probably gets over 1 billion page views per month. ;-). It would be interesting to see pageviews per article if anyone wants to add in the article counts for each community.
-Robert Rohde _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ foundation-l
-- Ziko van Dijk Roomberg 30 NL-7064 BN Silvolde _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 11:34 AM, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@googlemail.com wrote:
Thank you for the very interesting list. It is another useful list to compare Wikipedias, for my little study about Wikipedias in "weak" languages. Did you think about putting it on e.g. Meta Wiki? Ziko
I don't know Meta well enough to know where would be a good place to put it, but feel free to copy it wherever.
-Robert Rohde
I had put together this table, using "active wikipedians" from http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm - though, the enwiki numbers are outdated, it's still a useful comparison and hopefully we will get updated stats with the recent enwiki dump. ** Anyway, here is the table, which is active wikipedians in relation to the number of speakers of the language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_by_speakers (still need to re-run with these numbers)
So, while Arabic is one of the top five most widely spoken languages, it is well down on this list in terms of participation on the arwiki. Spanish is also further down on the list, than it should be. Chinese languages are down on the list, similar to the arwiki. And notice the various languages of India. ** *Wikipedia editors compared to number of speakers of languages* Language Region Speakers Active Wikipedians Score Sept2006 Jan2008 Finnish Scandinavia 6,100,000 742 871 142.7868 Norweigian Scandinavia 5,000,000 519 712 142.4000 English 309,000,000 43,001 43,000 139.1585 Swedish Scandinavia 9,000,000 761 1,107 123.0000 Estonian Eastern Europe 1,080,000 73 113 104.6296 Dutch Western Europe 20,000,000 1,497 1,831 91.5500 Danish Scandinavia 5,300,000 251 451 85.0943 French 64,800,000 3,608 5,019 77.4537 German Germany 95,400,000 7,238 7,258 76.0796 Hebrew 9,420,000 572 646 68.5774 Catalan Western Europe 6,600,000 187 419 63.4848 Hungarian Eastern Europe 14,000,000 283 769 54.9285 Czech Eastern Europe 12,000,000 348 612 51.0000 Italian Western Europe 61,500,000 1,862 3,097 50.3577 Polish Eastern Europe 42,700,000 1,502 2,059 48.2201 Lithuanian Eastern Europe 4,000,000 112 190 47.5 Japanese Japan 122,000,000 3,632 5,089 41.7131 Bulgarian Eastern Europe 9,000,000 170 315 35 Slovak Eastern Europe 5,600,000 137 183 32.6785 Russian Russia 145,000,000 1,008 2,185 15.0689 Romanian Eastern Europe 26,300,000 170 390 14.8288 Greek Europe 15,000,000 176 209 13.9333 Spanish 322,000,000 2,280 4,349 13.5062 Turkish Middle East 50,600,000 358 666 13.1620 Croatian Eastern Europe 21,100,000 130 199 9.4312 Indonesian Indonesia 23,100,000 140 198 8.5714 Portuguese 230,000,000 1,267 1,786 7.7652 Ukranian Eastern Europe 39,400,000 100 275 6.9796 Persian Iran 39,400,000 126 256 6.4974 Korean Korea 67,000,000 131 340 5.0746 Vietnamese South Asia 67,400,000 113 215 3.1899 Mandarin Chinese 873,000,000 1,050 1,726 1.9770 Arabic Middle East 206,000,000 147 399 1.9368 Cantonese Chinese 54,800,000 19 41 0.7481 Tamil Sri Lanka, India 66,000,000 32 43 0.6515 Telugu India 69,700,000 37 41 0.5882 Urdu Pakistan 60,500,000 14 33 0.5454 Marathi India 68,000,000 25 33 0.4852 Min Chinese 46,200,000 12 17 0.3679 Gujarati India 46,100,000 2 14 0.3036 Bengali South Asia 171,000,000 37 49 0.2865 Hindi India 181,000,000 25 46 0.2541 Javanese Indonesia 75,500,000 7 18 0.2384 Punjabi India 57,000,000 4 8 0.1403 Wu Chinese 77,200,000 6 10 0.1295
-Aude
The graf of data at the bottom was sort of unreadable for me, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to guess that while there are of course many hundreds of millions more native Mandarin speakers than English... many of these native speakers do not have regular Internet access. The issue of development level and Internet freedom impact South America, the Middle East and China among other areas (to address the mentions of Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin languages). In order to see if there is a true disparity of some sort, you'd need to compare Wikipedians in each project as a portion of the native speakers with free Internet access, not just a portion of the native speakers.
Nathan
I have it posted online (in more readable format) with other stuff I'm working on. I'm still sorting out the numbers and writing this, as a possible topic of discussion at Wikimania:
http://www.al-duroos.com/topics/index.php/Arabic_Wikipedia_essay#Appendix
Having a page for some of the stats on meta would be helpful.
-Aude
On 3/31/08, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
The graf of data at the bottom was sort of unreadable for me, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to guess that while there are of course many hundreds of millions more native Mandarin speakers than English... many of these native speakers do not have regular Internet access. The issue of development level and Internet freedom impact South America, the Middle East and China among other areas (to address the mentions of Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin languages). In order to see if there is a true disparity of some sort, you'd need to compare Wikipedians in each project as a portion of the native speakers with free Internet access, not just a portion of the native speakers.
Nathan _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Great, I will read it thoroughly. By the way, on en.WP there are already some articles about Wikipedias by language, maybe a general article about the multilingual side of WP could make sense, too. In de.WP there are hardly articles about Wikipedias, due to the rule that we don't like articles about the Wikipedia itself. But there is a small section in the Wikipedia name domain about the Wikipedia. Ziko
2008/3/31, Aude audevivere@gmail.com:
I have it posted online (in more readable format) with other stuff I'm working on. I'm still sorting out the numbers and writing this, as a possible topic of discussion at Wikimania:
http://www.al-duroos.com/topics/index.php/Arabic_Wikipedia_essay#Appendix
Having a page for some of the stats on meta would be helpful.
-Aude
On 3/31/08, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
The graf of data at the bottom was sort of unreadable for me, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to guess that while there are of course many hundreds of millions more native Mandarin speakers than English... many of these native speakers do not have regular Internet access. The issue of development level and Internet freedom impact South America, the Middle East and China among other areas (to address the mentions of Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin languages). In order to see if there is a true disparity of some sort, you'd need to compare Wikipedians in each project as a portion of the native speakers with free Internet access, not just a portion of the native speakers.
Nathan _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
--
Aude
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Your table did not come to me as a table, it is quite difficult to read... I could imagine that colleciting such statistics on a suitable Meta place would be a good idea, inspiring Wiki-ologists.
In that list article of Wikipedia, I would not say e.g. that German has 60 millions speakers of German as a "second language". A sociolinguist would say "foreign language". In general, considerations about Wikipedias and languages need some sociolinguist/interlinguist theoretical framework...
Ziko
2008/3/31, Aude audevivere@gmail.com:
I had put together this table, using "active wikipedians" from http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm - though, the enwiki numbers are outdated, it's still a useful comparison and hopefully we will get updated stats with the recent enwiki dump. ** Anyway, here is the table, which is active wikipedians in relation to the number of speakers of the language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_by_speakers (still need to re-run with these numbers)
So, while Arabic is one of the top five most widely spoken languages, it is well down on this list in terms of participation on the arwiki. Spanish is also further down on the list, than it should be. Chinese languages are down on the list, similar to the arwiki. And notice the various languages of India. ** *Wikipedia editors compared to number of speakers of languages* Language Region Speakers Active Wikipedians Score Sept2006 Jan2008 Finnish Scandinavia 6,100,000 742 871 142.7868 Norweigian Scandinavia 5,000,000 519 712 142.4000 English 309,000,000 43,001 43,000 139.1585 Swedish Scandinavia 9,000,000 761 1,107 123.0000 Estonian Eastern Europe 1,080,000 73 113 104.6296 Dutch Western Europe 20,000,000 1,497 1,831 91.5500 Danish Scandinavia 5,300,000 251 451 85.0943 French 64,800,000 3,608 5,019 77.4537 German Germany 95,400,000 7,238 7,258 76.0796 Hebrew 9,420,000 572 646 68.5774 Catalan Western Europe 6,600,000 187 419 63.4848 Hungarian Eastern Europe 14,000,000 283 769 54.9285 Czech Eastern Europe 12,000,000 348 612 51.0000 Italian Western Europe 61,500,000 1,862 3,097 50.3577 Polish Eastern Europe 42,700,000 1,502 2,059 48.2201 Lithuanian Eastern Europe 4,000,000 112 190 47.5 Japanese Japan 122,000,000 3,632 5,089 41.7131 Bulgarian Eastern Europe 9,000,000 170 315 35 Slovak Eastern Europe 5,600,000 137 183 32.6785 Russian Russia 145,000,000 1,008 2,185 15.0689 Romanian Eastern Europe 26,300,000 170 390 14.8288 Greek Europe 15,000,000 176 209 13.9333 Spanish 322,000,000 2,280 4,349 13.5062 Turkish Middle East 50,600,000 358 666 13.1620 Croatian Eastern Europe 21,100,000 130 199 9.4312 Indonesian Indonesia 23,100,000 140 198 8.5714 Portuguese 230,000,000 1,267 1,786 7.7652 Ukranian Eastern Europe 39,400,000 100 275 6.9796 Persian Iran 39,400,000 126 256 6.4974 Korean Korea 67,000,000 131 340 5.0746 Vietnamese South Asia 67,400,000 113 215 3.1899 Mandarin Chinese 873,000,000 1,050 1,726 1.9770 Arabic Middle East 206,000,000 147 399 1.9368 Cantonese Chinese 54,800,000 19 41 0.7481 Tamil Sri Lanka, India 66,000,000 32 43 0.6515 Telugu India 69,700,000 37 41 0.5882 Urdu Pakistan 60,500,000 14 33 0.5454 Marathi India 68,000,000 25 33 0.4852 Min Chinese 46,200,000 12 17 0.3679 Gujarati India 46,100,000 2 14 0.3036 Bengali South Asia 171,000,000 37 49 0.2865 Hindi India 181,000,000 25 46 0.2541 Javanese Indonesia 75,500,000 7 18 0.2384 Punjabi India 57,000,000 4 8 0.1403 Wu Chinese 77,200,000 6 10 0.1295
-Aude
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I'm finding with some languages including Arabic and major languages in India, that the Wikipedia sites in those languages (as well as readership) are drastically smaller than they should be given the number of speakers.
One reason for that is that many people (especially those who have access and use the Internet) have also learned English well. The breadth and quality of articles on English wiki is vastly greater than arwiki and many others. Also, many articles on arwiki are stubs.If you are an internet user who is proficient in both English and Arabic, and need to look up some information, where would you look to find the answer?
I think that's a major reason to explain the statistics on viewership and other aspects of the various language wikis.
-Aude
On 3/31/08, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@googlemail.com wrote:
Thank you for the very interesting list. It is another useful list to compare Wikipedias, for my little study about Wikipedias in "weak" languages. Did you think about putting it on e.g. Meta Wiki? Ziko
I have a similar assumption ... underlaid by my experience Arabic Wikimedians for working WM2008. Not few of them have preferred to start launching English version than Arabic version to set up a page, not only because it is the lingua franca on the project, but also because
* Those who have access and use the Internet have also learned English well (for Arabic, it is not always true, specially for North Africa except Egypt, they are good at Arabic and French but not always at English, but ME people tend to forget it) * Arabic has many dialects ... only educational people are literate in standard Arabic and then they may learn English well too (similar logic to the first) * Inputting Arabic is painful. English is easier to write specially on computer.
Similar opinions I heard from other language people. And yes, a stubby small project may be less informative than the largest Wikipedia ... so English Wikipedia visitor/user may not be equal to the population of native English country user base.
On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 3:50 AM, Aude audevivere@gmail.com wrote:
I'm finding with some languages including Arabic and major languages in India, that the Wikipedia sites in those languages (as well as readership) are drastically smaller than they should be given the number of speakers.
One reason for that is that many people (especially those who have access and use the Internet) have also learned English well. The breadth and quality of articles on English wiki is vastly greater than arwiki and many others. Also, many articles on arwiki are stubs.If you are an internet user who is proficient in both English and Arabic, and need to look up some information, where would you look to find the answer?
I think that's a major reason to explain the statistics on viewership and other aspects of the various language wikis.
-Aude
On 3/31/08, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@googlemail.com wrote:
Thank you for the very interesting list. It is another useful list to compare Wikipedias, for my little study about Wikipedias in "weak" languages. Did you think about putting it on e.g. Meta Wiki? Ziko
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Aude wrote:
I'm finding with some languages including Arabic and major languages in India, that the Wikipedia sites in those languages (as well as readership) are drastically smaller than they should be given the number of speakers.
There are so many variables that can explain differences in use.
It was discussed earlier that Hindi is traditionally not a language for encyclopedias. When Hindi speakers advance in society to the level where you buy an encyclopedia, you typically buy one in English because that has been considered the high status language. Promoting the Hindi Wikipedia thus means you have to introduce *two* novel concepts: a free online encyclopedia *and* a major encyclopedia in Hindi.
This was the state in northern Europe in the late 1800s. Well educated and wealthy Swedes and Russians would have the German Brockhaus or Meyers Enzyklopädie at home. Prestigious printed encyclopedias in the local language was a novelty (Nordisk familjebok, 1875; Brockhaus-Efron, 1890), that went hand in hand with nationalism and widened education. The first 10 volume encyclopedia in Finnish in the 1910s came with a brochure that explained what to expect from an encyclopedia. The wealthy classes in Finland spoke Swedish, but to speakers of Finnish this was a new concept.
Just like Californians are often more extreme than most Americans, this also goes when comparing Scandinavia to Germany. The Germans are careful and conservative, but the Scandinavians descend from those Germans who boldly went farther north than anybody had done. In the late 1990s, Sweden had a dotcom boom and crash, pretty much like California. Germany didn't have this. Internet usage became commonplace earlier in Sweden than in Germany. An Internet search for an actor's name would give several hits in Swedish, but nothing in German. When the Internet finally started to catch on in Germany around 2003, the German Wikipedia became an instant hit because it was the first German-speaking resource in many fields.
There are similiarties in the development between many countries and languages, but only if you move the timeline. Hindi in 2010 might, in some limited respect, be similar to Finnish in 1910. This could mean you should not only make a brochure in Hindi about the free online encyclopedia, but also a brochure in Hindi of what to expect from an encyclopedia in the first place, or why an encyclopedia should be available in their own language rather than just English. Maybe this is an idea that Ratan Tata can support?
Whether you compare the number of articles, the size of articles, the number of contributors or the number of visitors, you're only comparing what has been done. Our focus should be on what needs to be done. For example, Arabic and Chinese are languages spoken in countries where free access to knowledge and neutral information really needs to be promoted.
Hoi, When you read about the official languages of India, it is quite clear that there has been a movement to make Hindi the official language of India and replace English as such. At this time this is, according to the article, not likely to happen any time soon. What is of relevance here is that it is only now that the Hindi language is getting its localisation for MediaWiki.
The languages of India are really doing well for localisation. I am really interested to learn how this will affect the acceptance of these projects. At this stage we are moving towards the point where we support all the official languages of India.
The Bangla wikipedia is the biggest corpus in that language on the Internet. It would not surprise me that this is one reason why we can expect the Bangla Wikipedia to continue to do well. When the Indian language communities find a friendly competitive spirit, we can expect them to do as well as the European languages. Thanks, GerardM
On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 12:23 PM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Aude wrote:
I'm finding with some languages including Arabic and major languages in India, that the Wikipedia sites in those languages (as well as readership) are drastically smaller than they should be given the number of speakers.
There are so many variables that can explain differences in use.
It was discussed earlier that Hindi is traditionally not a language for encyclopedias. When Hindi speakers advance in society to the level where you buy an encyclopedia, you typically buy one in English because that has been considered the high status language. Promoting the Hindi Wikipedia thus means you have to introduce *two* novel concepts: a free online encyclopedia *and* a major encyclopedia in Hindi.
This was the state in northern Europe in the late 1800s. Well educated and wealthy Swedes and Russians would have the German Brockhaus or Meyers Enzyklopädie at home. Prestigious printed encyclopedias in the local language was a novelty (Nordisk familjebok, 1875; Brockhaus-Efron, 1890), that went hand in hand with nationalism and widened education. The first 10 volume encyclopedia in Finnish in the 1910s came with a brochure that explained what to expect from an encyclopedia. The wealthy classes in Finland spoke Swedish, but to speakers of Finnish this was a new concept.
Just like Californians are often more extreme than most Americans, this also goes when comparing Scandinavia to Germany. The Germans are careful and conservative, but the Scandinavians descend from those Germans who boldly went farther north than anybody had done. In the late 1990s, Sweden had a dotcom boom and crash, pretty much like California. Germany didn't have this. Internet usage became commonplace earlier in Sweden than in Germany. An Internet search for an actor's name would give several hits in Swedish, but nothing in German. When the Internet finally started to catch on in Germany around 2003, the German Wikipedia became an instant hit because it was the first German-speaking resource in many fields.
There are similiarties in the development between many countries and languages, but only if you move the timeline. Hindi in 2010 might, in some limited respect, be similar to Finnish in 1910. This could mean you should not only make a brochure in Hindi about the free online encyclopedia, but also a brochure in Hindi of what to expect from an encyclopedia in the first place, or why an encyclopedia should be available in their own language rather than just English. Maybe this is an idea that Ratan Tata can support?
Whether you compare the number of articles, the size of articles, the number of contributors or the number of visitors, you're only comparing what has been done. Our focus should be on what needs to be done. For example, Arabic and Chinese are languages spoken in countries where free access to knowledge and neutral information really needs to be promoted.
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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2008/4/1, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se:
In the late 1990s, Sweden had a dotcom boom and crash, pretty much like California. Germany didn't have this.
I agree with most of your witty remarks, but this is not true: Germany did have its boom and crash, certainly, I lost my job then!:-)
This is well said: A Hindi Wikipedia is a "double novelty". Many Wikipedias of "weak languages" have the problem that the lanugage is not absolutely ready to have an encyclopaedia. One of my favourite small Wikipedias is the West-Flemish: It is small, but obviously the 7 very active users did not make abuse of bots to produce rubbish articles to brighten the statistics. When I click on random pages, I often see small but useful articles e.g. about West-Flemish culture. The West Flemish Wikipedians openly admit that their language or dialect lacks standardization and so on. This is a problem the Esperanto Wikipedia, for example, has much less: Esperanto is a very unified language, with grammars and dictionaries many other small languages would be proud of. Of course, Esperanto hasn't the technical vocabulary to build airplanes, but English is nearly the only language to have so. By the way, Esperanto has practically no analphabets, no illiterates, no monolinguals. I wonder wether one can draw conclusions from this, like: If a language lacks basic standardization, then the Wikipedia will hardly work. Well, a thesis going along with a lot of "if"s and "maybe"s and "unless"s... :-) The Alemannic Wikipedia seems to be quite decent (many "real" articles"), but "Alemannic" hardly is a real language. It is High German (the Dachsprache, tegmental language, as Kloss would say) in a South German dressing. This is more or less the same with West Flemish (Dutch), Corsican (Italian) and so on...
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