Alright, if it's quality you're after (which I certainly agree with), there's another statistic that can be used, total database size.
Of course, you could fill a database with 3 gigabytes of stub pages, but it would be many, many, more stub pages and a much more "complete" Stub-Wikipedia than if you were to fill it with 3 gigabytes of HQ non-stub articles. It also doesn't take linguistic considerations into effect (texts in one language may be longer than equivalent texts in another)
It goes (stats from December)
1 English - ~2500mb 2 German - ~1000mb 3 Japanese - ~550mb 4 French - ~550mb 5 Polish - ~300mb 6 Italian - ~300mb 7 Dutch - ~250mb 8 Spanish - ~225mb 9 Portuguese - ~175mb ... 12 Chinese - ~125mb 13 Hebrew - ~125mb ... 26 Turkish - ~33mb ... 32 Arabic - ~26mb
The biggest divorce seems to be with the Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and Turkish Wikipedias.
This may or may not have something to do with it, but take a look at the Spanish vs French mainpages -- the French one mentions very, very prominently that anyone can edit, the Spanish one does not. The Chinese WP does mention it, I'm not 100% sure about the Arabic or Turkish.
Erik Moeller also has some good points.
Mark
On 28/03/06, 오현성 chamdalae@dreamwiz.com wrote:
Mark, I don't agree with all of your conclusions here....
What this says to me is that these Wikipedias are not attracting new pages proportional to views when compared with other Wikipedias. This may be because people don't want to write new pages, but it seems to me more likely that people simply don't know they can.
There are all kinds of possible reasons for this. It isn't necessarily because non-Europeans (and the wikipedias you seem to be referring to are mostly non-European wikipedias) are less likely to know that they can write new articles. Perhaps people are less interested in writing new articles, perhaps they're content with the articles that are there, or perhaps they have other ways to spend their time. Perhaps they _are_ increasingly writing new articles - some of the wikipedias you listed might still be small, but they are growing rapidly.
How can this be fixed? Perhaps a site notice inviting people to write quality pages or register, or a drive to recruit new Wikipedians from the academic community.
I think here you're confusing the issues of quantity and quality. Writing 'quality pages', or inviting academics to do so, isn't the way to boost page count quickly. And I'm sure many academics would be less interested in the number of articles a wikipedia has than the quality of those articles anyway. Perhaps it would be better to forget about page count and focus on improving the overall quality of wikipedia.
Hyunsung
Mark
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