[WikiEN-l] Looking for thoughts on statistics

[Carcharoth]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 7:08 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29 March 2010 03:55, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

>> If the other Wikipedias did similarly full coverage of their home
>> countries and we translated the articles, there would probably be
>> potential for an order of magnitude.
>
> Size of national libraries and the like says no.

How so? Number of countries is 193 (roughly), but even if you factor
in the fact that some countries share languages and some countries are
a bit, well, small, you still have something that could approach a
factor of x10 (i.e. an order of magnitude). There are plenty of cases
where I've run into a blank wall as far as English-language sources
go, but have been able to see that sources exist in another language
(usually the native language of the person or institution concerned),
so rather than miss things in translation, I try and find an article
in that language edition of Wikipedia, or wait for, or request, an
article, and then ask for it to be translated.

Has anyone ever done a study on what the total number of articles
would be if you assumed all interwiki links are currently correct
(many are not) and assumed that all non-interwikied articles need
translation (rather than someone adding the correct interwiki link,
which is just as likely), and come up with a total figure if all
articles were translated?

Carcharoth