[Foundation-l] Wikipedias by page views

[Ziko van Dijk]

2008/4/1, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se>:
>
>
> In the late 1990s, Sweden had a dotcom boom and crash, pretty much
> like California.  Germany didn't have this.



I agree with most of your witty remarks, but this is not true: Germany did
have its boom and crash, certainly, I lost my job then!:-)

This is well said: A Hindi Wikipedia is a "double novelty". Many Wikipedias
of "weak languages" have the problem that the lanugage is not absolutely
ready to have an encyclopaedia. One of my favourite small Wikipedias is the
West-Flemish: It is small, but obviously the 7 very active users did not
make abuse of bots to produce rubbish articles to brighten the statistics.
When I click on random pages, I often see small but useful articles e.g.
about West-Flemish culture.
The West Flemish Wikipedians openly admit that their language or dialect
lacks standardization and so on.
This is a problem the Esperanto Wikipedia, for example, has much less:
Esperanto is a very unified language, with grammars and dictionaries many
other small languages would be proud of. Of course, Esperanto hasn't the
technical vocabulary to build airplanes, but English is nearly the only
language to have so.
By the way, Esperanto has practically no analphabets, no illiterates, no
monolinguals.
I wonder wether one can draw conclusions from this, like: If a language
lacks basic standardization, then the Wikipedia will hardly work.
Well, a thesis going along with a lot of "if"s and "maybe"s and "unless"s...
:-) The Alemannic Wikipedia seems to be quite decent (many "real"
articles"), but "Alemannic" hardly is a real language. It is High German
(the Dachsprache, tegmental language, as Kloss would say) in a South German
dressing. This is more or less the same with West Flemish (Dutch), Corsican
(Italian) and so on...

Ziko










Ziko van Dijk
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NL-7064 BN Silvolde