[Foundation-l] 1.3 billion of humans don't have Wikipedia in their native...

[Marcus Buck]

An'n 23.05.2011 17:37, hett Ziko van Dijk schreven:
> I am even more pessimistic. Of course, Wikipedia exits in many
> languages, but many Wikipedia language versions are still quite small
> and of low quality, typical encyclopedias-to-become, but still no
> really useful encyclopedias by now.
If we consider the extent of old pre-internet paper encyclopedias as the 
threshold between "encyclopedia-to-become" and "encyclopedia" and if we 
don't aim at the top-tier encyclopedias, but at the middle-tier which 
was not as complete as the top-tier works but affordable, we are at 
about 150,000 entries, I guess.

 From my experience at the German Wikipedia it was at about 200,000 
articles when the last articles were created where I had the feeling 
that no serious encyclopedia could do without them.

For a naturally grown and not bot-fueled Wikipedia that should roughly 
be the number of articles to become indeed useful ... in coverage of 
topics relevant to the readers, quality is another issue. But I guess 
the quality of the Wikipedias is better than the quality of the big 
Wikipedias back then when they were the same size, because the smaller 
Wikipedias nowadays can draw from the bigger Wikipedias, an sourced 
information pool that was not available before.

Looking at <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias> we have 
17 Wikipedias that have more than 200,000 articles. Among them none that 
haven't had encyclopedias before the internet age.

Actually there are no languages anywhere in the top group where we could 
really prove our mission of bringing knowledge to people who before had 
no chance to obtain it in their native languages. All of them are either 
strong languages that have supporting national states and had decent 
encyclopedias before or they are bot fueled (Esperanto is neither, but 
it's also no language to reach people unreached by education).

Galician with 71,000 articles is the first language that has no strong 
supporting state/territory and is not mainly build by bots, where we 
serve an outstanding service to the language community. But they are of 
course reached by Spanish/Portuguese education.

Telugu with almost 48,000 articles seems to be the biggest wikipedia in 
a language where we serve the language community with things that 
wouldn't exist otherwise.

Yes, I think we are far away from being a useful and important 
encyclopedia except for the national languages of the first and second 
world.

Marcus Buck