[Foundation-l] New projects opened

[Lars Aronsson]

Andrew Gray wrote:

> For those curious as to overall statistics, that's about 270 language
> editions of Wikipedia, now. (The various lists seem to disagree
> slightly, and it's a little lower if we omit two "empty" projects).

I think we need to get away from counting articles and languages, 
as if all were equal and more were better.  Some languages are far 
more successful than others.  Some articles are far more useful 
than others.  Perhaps some languages and articles should be 
considered as failures and not be counted among our achievements.

Of these 270 languages of Wikipedia, only 41 have more than 50,000 
articles and only 69 had more than 1 million page views in July of 
2009.  The 69th most used Wikipedia is Swahili. This East African 
language has 50 million speakers, which is huge, but less than 
13,000 Wikipedia articles.  Can poverty and illiteracy alone 
explain why the Swahili Wikipedia is so far behind?

But Swahili is far from the worst.  Swahili has twice as many 
speakers as the West African language Yoruba (50 vs 25 M, both are 
huge languages) and twice the number of articles (13 k vs 6.3 k), 
but the Swahili Wikipedia had 6 times as many page views (1.0 M vs 
172 k).  Somebody with knowledge of Africa should study this in 
more detail.  For the speakers of these languages, in which 
proportions do they read (newspapers) or listen (to radio 
broadcasts) to get news and knowledge?  Do they ever use (printed) 
encyclopedias?

People who speak Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Norwegian are very 
similar in wealth, education, living conditions, and computer 
literacy.  Yet, the Danish Wikipedia is far smaller and less 
visited than the other three.  How can that be?  Traditionally, 
Danish is the more literate of these four cultures. If we can find 
out what holds the Danish Wikipedia back, and find a remedy, 
perhaps it can be applied to other languages as well.

Language          Danish     Norwegian  Swedish  Finnish
                             (Bokmål)
Speakers          6 M        4.7 M      9 M      6 M
Size rank         102        111        78       103

Wikipedia
articles          114 k      225 k      325 k    213 k
Size rank         23         13         11       14

July 2009
page views        14.7 M     21.5 M     59.8 M   49.7 M
Traffic rank      25         23         12       14
Annual growth     +18 %      +11 %      +19 %    +2 %

Views/speakers    2.4        4.6        6.6      8.3
Articles/spkr     .019       .047       .036     .036
Spkrs/article     53         21         28       28

Length of article on Michael Jackson
before his death  18 kB      20 kB      41 kB    20 kB
Current length    70 kB      26 kB      60 kB    44 kB
Views in July     72 k       58 k       175 k    136 k
Views/speaker     .012       .012       .019     .022

When compared to Swahili or Yoruba, all of these North European 
languages of Wikipedia have been very successful, having more page 
views in a month than speakers of the language, and much higher 
traffic rank (12-25) than language size rank (78-111).  But the 
interesting aspect is the differences within such a group, that 
presumably should have been even more homogeneous.

The German language has 105 M speakers, 942 k Wikipedia articles, 
and 846 M page views in July 2009, i.e. 8.0 views/speaker (as high 
as Finnish), but only .009 articles per speaker of the language 
(half of Danish).  The German Wikipedia is generally considered to 
be successful, yet it has a low number of articles per speaker of 
the language.  So maybe articles/speaker is a useless metric.

If the Finnish Wikipedia can get 8.3 page views per speaker of the 
language with only 213 k articles, then perhaps their articles are 
better (more informative, more useful) than the larger number of 
articles in the Swedish Wikipedia, which only attract 6.6 page 
views per speaker of the language.

The German article on Michael Jackson got 2.1 M page views during 
July, or .020 per speaker of the language, similar to the Swedish 
and Finnish Wikipedia articles.  Why did the Danish and Norwegian 
articles get only 12 page views per thousand speakers?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se