[Foundation-l] It's not article count, it's editors

[Andrew Gray]

2009/9/23 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:

> The reason "how we have not reached large parts of the world yet" is
> because access to Wikipedia is significantly influenced by things
> outside of Wikimedia's control and scope.

A dramatic demonstration of this: if someone in Beijing flips a switch
tomorrow, and zh.wp becomes blocked, our potential audience changes by
three hundred million (internet users) or a billion (speakers)
overnight (depending if you count population or internet users) and
our nominal penetration among Chinese-speakers would presumably
collapse as a result.

> Surely someone must have a respectable count of internet users by
> language that we could use for comparison? That would be a much better
> metric for our success today; while raw literate speaker numbers would
> be a useful comparison for what we could start reaching with
> non-internet mechanisms.

There's a couple of estimates on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage

though they look a little dated.

Alternatively, users by country is reasonably well estimated, I think,
and you could try estimating based on languages from that.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk