There are 3 phenomena acting simultaneously against the number of visits to small projects: The bilingual effect, the size effect, and the Google effect. For Catalan case we estimate a penalization factor of 8.3 (that means that visits are 8.3 times less that what they should be). It comes from: 1.2 bilingual factor (visits lost because people also understand other languages, even if they have the opportunity to read the article in their mother tongue, they also read it in others). 2.5 size factor (visits to other projects because readers don’t find what they were looking for in their mother tongue). And 2,77 Google factor. (Visits lost because Google directs people to other tongues projects). The only positive factor is the bilingual one. We are working hard to correct the others. For other projects those factors can be very different but the concept can be there.
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 02:40:06 -0700 From: Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Where do our readers come from? Q&A To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 849f98ed1001160140h20c69f6fxa5a7a22d4b81eb37@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Sociolinguistic situations around the world are very complex I think. In especially former European colonies, of which Kenya is but one example, the language of the former colonial power often has a unique position in society.
It is not surprising to me that the English Wikipedia is so popular compared to any other in Kenya, but it is quite a bit more surprising that Korean, Romanian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Iranian, etc. users prefer the English Wikipedia.
Mark
On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 2:25 AM, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk@googlemail.com
wrote:
Dear Erik,
Maybe there is a dirty Polish word looked up by many Polish pupils, and when they Google it they come to eu.WP because a Basque word accidentally is alike? :-)
I am looking now for the interest in the native / the English Wikipedia in specific countries. It might be important how localized the software in general is. If you live in, say, Kenya, and your computer has Windows in English, the Internet Explorer and everything is oriented to English, and you google your home town in an English language Google, it is probable that you will get the Wikipedia article in English and not in Swahili.
Kind regards Ziko
Joan Goma hett schreven:
There are 3 phenomena acting simultaneously against the number of visits to small projects: The bilingual effect, the size effect, and the Google effect. For Catalan case we estimate a penalization factor of 8.3 (that means that visits are 8.3 times less that what they should be). It comes from: 1.2 bilingual factor (visits lost because people also understand other languages, even if they have the opportunity to read the article in their mother tongue, they also read it in others). 2.5 size factor (visits to other projects because readers don’t find what they were looking for in their mother tongue). And 2,77 Google factor. (Visits lost because Google directs people to other tongues projects). The only positive factor is the bilingual one. We are working hard to correct the others. For other projects those factors can be very different but the concept can be there.
Interesting. What's the math behind that numbers? Or the source?
Marcus Buck
On 01/18/2010 09:29 AM, Joan Goma wrote:
There are 3 phenomena acting simultaneously against the number of visits to small projects: The bilingual effect, the size effect, and the Google effect. For Catalan case we estimate a penalization factor of 8.3 (that means that visits are 8.3 times less that what they should be).
In the long term, it seems like we could compensate for all of these effects in software.
I'm imagining a user experience where we make it easy for multilingual users to switch back and forth. That would include passive detection of multilingual users, hinting when good content is available in other languages, and making it easy for multilingual users to help translate content. It might also be worth looking at URL schemes that are not 100% language-specific, to focus the Google effect more usefully.
That would require a lot of technical work, and would raise a number of non-technical issues, but I don't see any insurmountable barriers to a more fluid experience for multilingual users.
William
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