Other than the things already mentioned, I only noticed one major thing.

That is: constant confusion of terms, ie saying "Wikipedia" when you mean "English Wikipedia".

And using statistics for all language Wikipedias combined when in practice the article is about the English Wikipedia (though wikipedia.com will get you to an international portal) seems a bit misleading.

There are not nearly 1 million articles in the English version: there are around 500k in the English version, and the rest of the 1.3 million or whatever are made up by other Wikipedias.

The largest non-English Wikipedias are (in no particular order):

German Japanese Polish Spanish French

...

there are quite a few more large ones as well, such as Swedish, Dutch, Italian, Ukrainian, and then there are plenty more in decreasing orders of magnitude down to Wikipedias with 1 or 2 articles.

Examples:

1 or 2-article Wikipedias... not really worth visiting, though if you want to you can try http://zu.wikipedia.org/ (Zulu Wikipedia). Most of them are in African or Native American languages. It used to include most of the languages of India, but there was a sudden surge and most of them have grown to over 100 articles now, some over 1000. 60~70 article Wikipedias... the Maltese Wikipedia is a good example. http://mt.wikipedia.org/ 100~200 article Wikipedias... the Breton http://br.wikipedia.org/ and Urdu http://ur.wikipedia.org/ Wikipedias are good examples here. Still not really usable as an encyclopaedia, but getting there slowly (some nice recent additions to the Breton Wikipedia include plenty of long, detailed articles on linguistics topics) 200~500 article Wikipedias... the Anglo-Saxon http://ang.wikipedia.org/ and Aragonese http://an.wikipedia.org/ are good examples. 500~700 articles... the Irish http://ga.wikipedia.org/ , Limburgish http://li.wikipedia.org/ and Georgian (the country, not the state) http://ka.wikipedia.org/ are good examples here. 700~1k articles... the Tagalog http://tl.wikipedia.org/ , Albanian http://sq.wikipedia.org/ , and Sicilian http://scn.wikipedia.org/ Wikipedias are nice examples. 1k~2k articles... Belarusian http://be.wikipedia.org/ , W.Frisian http://fy.wikipedia.org/ , Kurdish http://ku.wikipedia.org/ , Thai http://th.wikipedia.org/ and Vietnamese http://vi.wikipedia.org/ 2k~5k articles... Farsi http://fa.wikipedia.org/ , Turkish http://tr.wikipedia.org/ , Greek http://el.wikipedia.org/ , Welsh http://cy.wikipedia.org/ , Arabic http://ar.wikipedia.org/ , Bosnian http://bs.wikipedia.org/ , Latin http://la.wikipedia.org/ , Icelandic http://is.wikipedia.org/ , Malay http://ms.wikipedia.org/ 5k~10k articles....Hungarian http://hu.wikipedia.org/ , Czech http://cz.wikipedia.org/ , Korean http://ko.wikipedia.org/ , Slovak http://sk.wikipedia.org/ , Croatian http://hr.wikipedia.org/ 10k~20k articles... Romanian http://ro.wikipedia.org/ , Ukrainian http://uk.wikipedia.org/ , Serbian http://sr.wikipedia.org/ , Slovene http://sl.wikipedia.org/ , Catalan http://ca.wikipedia.org/ , Russian http://ru.wikipedia.org/ , Finnish http://fi.wikipedia.org/ , Hebrew http://he.wikipedia.org/ 20k~30k... Bulgarian http://bg.wikipedia.org/ , Danish http://da.wikipedia.org/ , Norwegian http://no.wikipedia.org/ , Chinese http://zh.wikipedia.org/ 30k~50k... Portuguese http://pt.wikipedia.org/ , Spanish http://es.wikipedia.org/ , Italian http://it.wikipedia.org/ 50k~100k... Polish http://pl.wikipedia.org/ , Dutch http://nl.wikipedia.org/ , Swedish http://sv.wikipedia.org/ 100k~200k... Japanese http://ja.wikipedia.org/ , French http://fr.wikipedia.org/ 200k~500k.... German http://de.wikipedia.org/ 500k~600k.... English http://en.wikipedia.org/

Thus, at present, the English Wikipedia makes up for... a little less than 1/3rd of all article count, I believe?

Mark

On 03/05/05, Lawrence Nyveen nyveen@videotron.ca wrote:

Hey, all -

Reader's Digest (Canada) plans to reprint a version of this article: http://legadoassociates.com/wikipedi.htm

My job is to fact-check the article before it goes into the magazine, and to do that, I would like to talk with some Wikipedia contributors. Anyone interested in helping me fact-check the article should contact me through e-mail. A lot of the article is not base so much on strict facts but is rather the author's opinion on WIkipedia's place in the encyclopedia ecosystem, yet I still have to check that. I need to report to my editors whether the author has defensible ideas.

To do his, I wouldn't mind speaking to both avid contributors and those with criticisms. Thanks in advance, all.

(Jimmy - I would like to get in touch with you about this, since you're mentioned by name. I left voicemail for Terry Foote on Friday, but I haven't heard back.)

--

Laurie Nyveen nyveen@videotron.ca __________________________________________________________________ Editor, Netsurfer Digest - http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/index.html "All we are, basically, are monkeys with car keys." - Grandma Woody (Northern Exposure) _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l