[Foundation-l] A question for the Wikimania jury

[Robert Rohde]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 7:54 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 3/30/08, Austin Hair <adhair at gmail.com> wrote:
> [snip]
> >  As Patricia points
> >  out later in this thread, South America is home to a huge chunk of our
> >  existing and potential community;
> [snip]
>
> It would, perhaps, be informative if the selection committee would
> share with us its understanding of the geographic breakdown of the
> Wiki(p|m)edia editor and reader communities.



I don't speak for the committee, however, Wikipedia's page view stats (
stats.grok.se) suggest that es.wikipedia has about 40% of the traffic of
de.wikipedia.  It similarly has about half the number of articles and active
editors as de.  In fact, from browsing the different Wikipedia page view
stats it appears that Spanish is the fourth largest reader community behind
only English, German, and Japanese.

Whatever else you might care about, Spanish is one of the most significant
languages for Wikimedia projects.  For that matter, it certainly beats out
Arabic or any other Egypt-centric languages.  (Of course if we were doing
things on a purely traffic proportional basis, we'd have somewhat more than
one English-centric conference for each conference in any foriegn language
locale.)

-Robert Rohde