[Foundation-l] New projects opened

[Robert Rohde]

Personally, I think the 20000 articles in the Bengali Wikipedia
serving a speaking community of 230 million is an even better example
of failure.

-Robert Rohde

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 8:22 PM, Lars Aronsson<lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> Andrew Gray wrote:
>
>> For those curious as to overall statistics, that's about 270 language
>> editions of Wikipedia, now. (The various lists seem to disagree
>> slightly, and it's a little lower if we omit two "empty" projects).
>
> I think we need to get away from counting articles and languages,
> as if all were equal and more were better.  Some languages are far
> more successful than others.  Some articles are far more useful
> than others.  Perhaps some languages and articles should be
> considered as failures and not be counted among our achievements.
>
> Of these 270 languages of Wikipedia, only 41 have more than 50,000
> articles and only 69 had more than 1 million page views in July of
> 2009.  The 69th most used Wikipedia is Swahili. This East African
> language has 50 million speakers, which is huge, but less than
> 13,000 Wikipedia articles.  Can poverty and illiteracy alone
> explain why the Swahili Wikipedia is so far behind?
>
> But Swahili is far from the worst.  Swahili has twice as many
> speakers as the West African language Yoruba (50 vs 25 M, both are
> huge languages) and twice the number of articles (13 k vs 6.3 k),
> but the Swahili Wikipedia had 6 times as many page views (1.0 M vs
> 172 k).  Somebody with knowledge of Africa should study this in
> more detail.  For the speakers of these languages, in which
> proportions do they read (newspapers) or listen (to radio
> broadcasts) to get news and knowledge?  Do they ever use (printed)
> encyclopedias?
>
> People who speak Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Norwegian are very
> similar in wealth, education, living conditions, and computer
> literacy.  Yet, the Danish Wikipedia is far smaller and less
> visited than the other three.  How can that be?  Traditionally,
> Danish is the more literate of these four cultures. If we can find
> out what holds the Danish Wikipedia back, and find a remedy,
> perhaps it can be applied to other languages as well.
>
> Language          Danish     Norwegian  Swedish  Finnish
>                             (Bokmål)
> Speakers          6 M        4.7 M      9 M      6 M
> Size rank         102        111        78       103
>
> Wikipedia
> articles          114 k      225 k      325 k    213 k
> Size rank         23         13         11       14
>
> July 2009
> page views        14.7 M     21.5 M     59.8 M   49.7 M
> Traffic rank      25         23         12       14
> Annual growth     +18 %      +11 %      +19 %    +2 %
>
> Views/speakers    2.4        4.6        6.6      8.3
> Articles/spkr     .019       .047       .036     .036
> Spkrs/article     53         21         28       28
>
> Length of article on Michael Jackson
> before his death  18 kB      20 kB      41 kB    20 kB
> Current length    70 kB      26 kB      60 kB    44 kB
> Views in July     72 k       58 k       175 k    136 k
> Views/speaker     .012       .012       .019     .022
>
> When compared to Swahili or Yoruba, all of these North European
> languages of Wikipedia have been very successful, having more page
> views in a month than speakers of the language, and much higher
> traffic rank (12-25) than language size rank (78-111).  But the
> interesting aspect is the differences within such a group, that
> presumably should have been even more homogeneous.
>
> The German language has 105 M speakers, 942 k Wikipedia articles,
> and 846 M page views in July 2009, i.e. 8.0 views/speaker (as high
> as Finnish), but only .009 articles per speaker of the language
> (half of Danish).  The German Wikipedia is generally considered to
> be successful, yet it has a low number of articles per speaker of
> the language.  So maybe articles/speaker is a useless metric.
>
> If the Finnish Wikipedia can get 8.3 page views per speaker of the
> language with only 213 k articles, then perhaps their articles are
> better (more informative, more useful) than the larger number of
> articles in the Swedish Wikipedia, which only attract 6.6 page
> views per speaker of the language.
>
> The German article on Michael Jackson got 2.1 M page views during
> July, or .020 per speaker of the language, similar to the Swedish
> and Finnish Wikipedia articles.  Why did the Danish and Norwegian
> articles get only 12 page views per thousand speakers?
>
>
> --
>  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
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