Wikipedia: statistics analysis - WikimediaZA

9 Sep 2010

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-perspectiv…) 
- 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(a)lists.wikimedia.org
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Message: 4
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2010 03:20:54 +0530
From: theo10011 &lt;de10011(a)gmail.com&gt;
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] New Stats- Global perspective about
	Wikipedia	Page edits
To: wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org,
	wikimedia-in-del(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Message-ID:
	&lt;AANLkTikptWFBKxPhbaumt-ojd0yqx8z+5GwrBzMjRvsd(a)mail.gmail.com&gt;
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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-perspectiv…

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/SquidReportVisitsPerCountryTren…

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/SquidReportEditsPerCountryTrend…

The most surprising information is in the language-wise breakdown of edits
per country:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportVisitsPerLanguageBre…

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