[Foundation-l] (correction) Re: Notice of the results of the WMF Board of Trustees election

[Andrew Gray]

On 18/07/07, Ben McIlwain <cydeweys at gmail.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Thomas Dalton wrote:
> >> The top five, incidentally - enwp, dewp, frwp, jawp and plwp - account
> >> for 75%; the second five for 15%!
> >
> > Hmmm... 253 wikis, top 5 is 2% and has 75% of the edits, top 10, or 4%
> > has 90%. That's much greater inequality than the 80-20 rule!
>
> There's nothing unexpected about this, of course, due merely to the way
> that human languages work.  Anyway, that figure of 253 wikis is hardly
> useful.  I wouldn't call the top 5 wikis "merely" 2%.  I'd bet that at
> least a third of the world's population can speak at least one of the
> top 5 wikis' languages.

en - 980m all told
de - 170m all told
fr - 350 to 500m all told
ja - 130m all told
pl - maybe 55m all told

As it is, three of the top 5 are German, Japanese and Polish, which
whilst pretty populous countries aren't major "multinational
languages" (though I was pleasantly surprised by the number of
second-language German speakers). The next five has Spanish and
Portugese, but the really big one is zhwp, in twelfth place.

Unfortunately, being blocked in China has handicapped zhwp's growth
something awful - we'd be in with a very good shot at a third
otherwise :-)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk