[Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] Language versions' popularity vs. number of articles (vs. number of speakers)

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
I have read the thread as it was published so far and I am amazed that 
nobody mentioned one simple reason why people do not edit or add content 
to the Arab, the Farsi, the Hebrew and Assamese projects .. It is too 
bloody hard. When you say "everybody can edit", it is as if it is the 
same effort is involved. I read somewhere where an African president 
said; "we do not have scripts yet for all of our indigenous languages. 
When the yi.wikipedia celebrated its 1000th article Gangleri was thanked 
for his hard work to make this technically possible. When I created some 
Farsi training material on Wikibooks, I needed two browsers to complete 
certain tasks; both Internet Explorer and Firefox were not up to the task.

Gangleri does a great job, he is imho one of the most valuable 
Wikimedians because he tries to make it possible to have information in 
all languages. To take things to the next level, we need more 
developers; people of all the language families and make sure with them 
that MediaWiki is up to the task. So far we have been self 
congratulatory about how well we do. We profess that we want to do 
better in Africa Asia and South America. We can if we make it a priority.

For me improving these issues /is/ a priority. http://WiktionaryZ.org 
requires good support for all languages. I am happy that we initiated 
the "Multilingual Mediawiki" project as it will further improve the 
multilingual capabilities of MediaWiki. It will still not do all the 
things that are necessary to make MediaWiki as easy to edit as it is for 
us. For that I need people that speak Hindi Assamese Twi Farsi Arab 
Hebrew and help us define what /their /problem with our software is and 
when we are lucky help us fix these issues.

Thanks,
    GerardM


Mark Williamson wrote:
> 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