[Foundation-l] Statistics and chapters: searching for chapters

[Milos Rancic]

On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 8:27 AM, Joan Goma <jrgoma at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just a short remark: the most statistically explicative parameter for
> Wikipedia activity is not the number of internet connections but GDP (except
> for English and Chinese projects which exhibit singular behavior). Perhaps
> you could retry the analysis using GDP and find some more countries where
> chapters are achievable.
>
> Sorry for not providing references. This comes from a not yet published
> research work that applies reasonable hypothesis to transfer more than 20
> parameters from country data into language data and then apply statistical
> methods to search for correlations between those data and size of Wikipedia
> projects.

Actually, you are right. Nominal [1] and PPP GDP [2] are more accurate
than anything else. At least for the first 20 countries. Here are
results:

* Number of Internet users: 9 chapters.
* GDP, nominal, according to IMF: 12 chapters.
* GDP, PPP, according to IMF: 12 chapters.

However, I think that GDP, including nominal and PPP, wouldn't be so
accurate when we come to other countries. For example, Nigeria has
bigger nominal GDP than Israel, Ukraine, Egypt, New Zealand, Croatia,
Slovenia, Serbia etc., but mentioned countries have chapters or have
strong initiatives for chapters.

GDP per capita (nominal and PPP) is more confusing because a lot of
small countries have very high GDP/pc. For example, it is not
realistic to expect Lichtenstein or even Luxemburg to create chapters
before India, as well as many significantly poorer countries already
have chapters (Serbia, Macedonia, Indonesia).

But, it is true that we need some more complex scale for targeting
countries for the future chapters.

And for Erik: If it is possible, I would like to have regional
statistics for some huge countries, if possible. I am almost sure that
it is possible for USA, as well as it is maybe possible for India,
Brazil and Russia.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29
[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29