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)
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.
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.
Mark
-- "Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin