I suppose there is no such thing as a single explanation. Some editions may have an approach problem, that is, they may not be good enough in marketing themselves. Other may stumble against a local tradition in which a written word is a law, so people read and believes, rather than editing and adding/discussing content. Cultures are very different. Besides, most people who can properly use a wiki will also look for an english version in the first place, and only eventually access a local variant. Too bad these are also the guys who can mostly use an editor.
IMHO, edition lacking partecipation should better focus on their work with children, who are quicker into adopting technologies. The wiki generation had time enough to grow up in many language spaces, but is only being born in many others. Instead of looking for a quick rise in rating, I'd rather advice people to build solid grounds for the future.
Bèrto
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 5:18 AM Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Language versions' popularity vs. number of articles(vs. number of speakers)
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 _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l