[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Projects Growth Animated

[Lars Aronsson]

Florence Devouard wrote:

> Strange as well to see that in the case of an already pretty big 
> .sv, half of the articles are <0,5 ko.

At the Swedish Wikipedia, we're very well aware of this.  It is 
"pretty big" only by article count, not so much by word count. 
Article count is a traditional measure for encyclopedias, but it 
can be inflated if a few large articles are split into many 
smaller ones.  If stubs are merged into larger articles (e.g. 
"villages in Bretagne", instead of having one stub for each), the 
amount of text is unchanged, but the article count is lowered.

If we were to count words or something to that effect, the Russian 
Wikipedia (the 11th biggest by article count) would already be 
bigger than Swedish (10th).  The Polish (4th) and Dutch (6th) 
Wikipedias would also fall behind Japanese (5th) and Italian 
(7th).  Over all, the ranking of Wikipedias would become more 
similar to the ranking of languages (by number of speakers).

There is currently a discussion on how to possibly rearrange the 
top ten positions at www.wikipedia.org taking place on 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Top_Ten_Wikipedias

My congratulations to the donation from the Sloan Foundation!


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se