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(a)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(a)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)
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