[Foundation-l] New projects opened

Thu Aug 20 07:03:49 UTC 2009

Hoi,
Apparently you are not aware that the Bengali Wikipedia is the biggest
resource in Bengali on the Internet. As a consequence it is a big success !!
Sure there should be more articles and we would absolutely welcome more
articles, more readers more positive attention for the Bengali Wikipedia.

One other way of looking at it is the quality of the technical support for
Bengali. I think I remember that there are issues with the Bengali script. I
also think I remember that there was no solution forth coming. If I remember
well, I would argue that that despite the odds the Bengali language
Wikipedia is doing really well.
Thanks,
      GerardM

2009/8/20 Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com>

> 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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