It's quite interesting to see how few edits are made from South
Africa. My theory would be that emigration is to blame.

And this graph helps to prove it. Less than one fifth of the views of
the Afrikaans Wikipedia comes from South Africa. (I could not find a
statistical breakdown of the number of edits on the Afrikaans
Wikipedia.)
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportPageViewsPerLanguageBreakdown.htm#Afrikaans

And it fits with other evidence. For example medical research done in
South Africa has shown a dramatic decline over the last 20 years. Many
of those researchers have left for greener pastures and their edits on
Wikipedia are now reflected as coming from other countries.

On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 7:47 AM, Achal Prabhala <aprabhala@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is a message on the Wikimedia India list from a Wikipedian who
> pulled out facts relevant to India from Wikimedia's public statistics
> (http://infodisiac.com/blog/2010/09/wikipedia-page-edits-a-global-perspective/)
> - very usefully compiled by Erik Zachte, who is the czar of all things
> statistical in our universe - and I thought it may be useful to share. I
> found it tremendously interesting to understand what works in India and
> how. The statistics for South Africa are slightly less deep (on account
> of lower volume) but still, someone might be able to extrapolate and
> share useful information from it?
>
> Alternately, if one of you is really interested in getting deeper
> statistics for within South Africa, perhaps you could write to Erik and
> see if he has anything interesting to share. (Scroll down to the bottom
> of the main page of www.infodisiac.com for his email address). There is
> just a whole lot of interesting statistical information on his site and
> on his blog, in general.
>
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject:        Wikimediaindia-l Digest, Vol 27, Issue 7
> Date:   Wed, 08 Sep 2010 04:14:25 +0000
> From:   wikimediaindia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org
> Reply-To:       wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> To:     wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>
>
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2010 03:20:54 +0530
> From: theo10011 <de10011@gmail.com>
> Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] New Stats- Global perspective about
>        Wikipedia       Page edits
> To: wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org,
>        wikimedia-in-del@lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID:
>        <AANLkTikptWFBKxPhbaumt-ojd0yqx8z+5GwrBzMjRvsd@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Hey everyone
>
> Just wanted to inform everyone that there are some new statistics available
> about global Wikipedia usage for Q3 of this year.
>
> http://infodisiac.com/blog/2010/09/wikipedia-page-edits-a-global-perspective/
>
> I just saw some surprising trends if you look at a language and country-wise
> breakdown of page views and edits.
>
> 1.India is No. 15 globally in terms of Wikipedia page views and edits which
> is expected for having only 7% internet usage, one of the lowest in the
> first 50 countries on the list.
>
> 2. India is still the fifth largest viewer of the English Wikipedia.
>
> 3. 94% of Indian Wikimedians view the English Wikipedia, the second largest
> language group for India after English is Hindi with 0.6% of total views.
>
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportVisitsPerCountryTrends.htm
>
> 4. 70% of edits from India are on the English Wikipedia (this marks a
> gradual fall in edits from 81% in Q4 2009) followed by 6.6% for Telugu (this
> quarter also marks a large increase in edits in Telugu and Tamil languages,
> while Hindi and Malayalam both registered a drop)
>
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportEditsPerCountryTrends.htm
>
> The most surprising information is in the language-wise breakdown of edits
> per country:
>
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportVisitsPerLanguageBreakdown.htm#
>
> The first Indian language on the list by 0.03% of global share is Hindi,
> followed by Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi, all at 0.02% of global Usage. the
> most surprising statistics is that the largest Page views to these languages
> is not from India but the US sometimes more than several times the number of
> views from India. Tamil is the only language where this disparity as its
> lowest.
>
> The number of views from India is highest at 94% to the English Wikipedia
> but the number of edits has been steadily dropping at a very sharp rate
> (almost 10% in the last year).
>
>
> Regards
>
> Salmaan
>
>
>
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> WikimediaZA mailing list
> WikimediaZA@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaza
>

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