[Foundation-l] Where do our readers come from?

[Marco Chiesa]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 3:51 PM, Marcus Buck <me a marcusbuck.org> wrote:
>
> It would make sense. But at the moment  WMDE is not even actively doing
> anything for the _native_ languages of Germany except for German. I
> think that would be the first step to do.
>

I had a quick look at the native languages of Italy, and I found out
that the percentage of visits from Italy is much smaller for the
regional languages:
Italian: 90.4%
Neapolitan: 45.8%
Tarantino: 43.2%
Emiliano-Romagnolo: 34.5%
Venetian: 33.9%
Lombard: 29.5%
Sicilian: 27.6%
Sardinian: 26.4%
Piedmontese: 24.8%
Friulian: 17.8%
Ligurian: 17.6%

I see a couple of reasons for this difference:
1) Bot visits count proportionally much more in smaller wikis
2) We know that, at least in some of these projects, a lot of
contributors are migrants (even 2nd or 3rd generation) that try to
maintain the regional languages their parents/grandparents used (Italy
had a lot of emigration in the 20th century), so it shouldn't be hard
to imagine that the same happens for the readers. This also partly
explains why Wikimedia Italia has little penetration within this
projects.

It would be interesting to see if the same happens for other
countries, for example Germany
Cruccone