On 4/11/06, Philip Welch wikipedia@philwelch.net wrote:
How else, my friend, are people supposed to read the English Wikipedia? If we ever get around to translating en. articles to the other language wikis, we can reorganize them there. I'm sure in the Russian Wikipedia, the country has priority over the state.
There are a massive number of people in the world who are not "English speakers", but can certainly read it. Hell, I work with lots of them. English is almost certainly the most understood language in the world, if not the most spoken as a first language.
I'm also taking a guess here, but I suspect that for some languages, your best bet to get information would be to use machine translation of EN Wikipedia. I'm not totally positive though, because the languages that have machine translation on google are probably our best Wikipedias as well (German, Spanish, French...) but maybe Portuguese or something.
Damn I wish we had some more stats :) Especially readership stats, if my hunch that there are silent masses reading Wikipedia from other countries without contributing much, is correct.
Steve