That's certainly a good point.
Unfortunately, the most recent statistics we have for site visits are from October 2004 but they are as follows:
1 English: 42.75% 2 Japanese: 14.72% 3 German: 13.74% 4 Spanish: 5.34% 5 French: 4.14% 6 Polish: 3.93% 7 Dutch: 2.94% 8 Swedish: 1.74% 9 Chinese: 1.42% 10 Italian: 1.20% 11 Portuguese: 1.20% 12 Hebrew: 0.94% 13 Danish: 0.53% 14 Finnish: 0.52% 15 Esperanto: 0.32% 16 Norwegian: 0.28% 17 Russian: 0.25% 18 Arabic: 0.25% 19 Slovene: 0.23% 20 Catalan: 0.21% 21 Korean: 0.16% 22 Malaysian: 0.16% 23 Bulgarian: 0.15% 24 Romanian: 0.15% 25 Simple: 0.14% 26 Czech: 0.13% 27 Hungarian: 0.13% 28 Indonesian: 0.13% 29 Estonian: 0.12% 30 Interlingua: 0.12% 31 Croatian: 0.11% 32 Turkish: 0.10% 33 Farsi: 0.10%
This still raises some questions; for example the Catalan WP has over 20k articles while the Arabic WP has just over 10k; numbers for Chinese, Spanish, and even Japanese (!) are similarly incongruent.
Mark
On 29/03/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
Hi everybody,
While it's sort of obvious, given the digital divide, that the number of articles in Wikipedias is not proportional to the number of speakers, for example Hindi has a much smaller number of articles compared to speakers than most active Wikipedias; German has more.
However, something that people may not notice as much is the incongruency between popularity of a particular language version and the number of articles in that version.
The most visited Wikipedias, in order, are:
1 English (65%) 2 German (10%) 3 Japanese (6%) 4 Spanish (3%) 5 French (2%) 6 Polish (2%) 7 Chinese (2%) 8 Arabic (2%) 9 Italian (1%) 10 Hebrew (1%) 11 Turkish (1%) 12 Dutch (1%) 13 Portuguese (1%) (all others combined total 1% of visits)
On the other hand, the list of Wikipedias ranked by number of articles is: 1 English (1048.7K) 2 German (376.9K) 3 French (261.1K) 4 Polish (223.8K) 5 Japanese (196.3K) 6 Dutch (156.9K) ... 8 Italian (146.8K) 9 Portuguese (123.8K) 10 Spanish (105.0K) ... 12 Chinese (61.48K) ... 17 Hebrew (34.35K) ... 29 Turkish (19.94K) ... 37 Arabic (12.03K)
Hi
By the way, I have wondered for a long time how it could be that the french wikipedia be the third largest (which is a fact)... and only supposingly 2% of the visits. I also remember that meta had very significantly more visits than the french wikipedia. Which.. to me... is not something I *believe*.
Answer : these values are collected strictly thanks to the use of the Alexa bar...; which is apparently very little used at least in France. Hence possibly messing up the statistics. It might well be the same for other languages, in particular those for which the Alexa bar... is simply not working/translated. So... be careful with the use of the Alexa data. They are a very interesting feedback... but also to take with a pinch of salt.
By the way, there was recently a study by Mediametry (a statistical agency, making polls. In France, probably the largest and most famous one).
The study showed this
déc. 2004 avr. 2005 août 2005 déc. 2005USA 4 544 000 6 753 000 11 874 000 17 498 000 Germany 1 707 000 2 956 000 4 502 000 5 529 000 France 681 000 1 169 000 1 429 000 2 421 000 UK 540 000 766 000 1 525 000 2 298 000
Please see that : http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mediametrie+wikipedia&btnG=Goog...
anthere
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