(And yes, I know that Language planning and some of the other items are not measurable as numbers. I'm throwing ideas around.)
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2015-01-25 17:57 GMT-08:00 Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il:
Hi,
It is well-known that the size of a Wikipedia in a given language is not proportional to the number of people who speak that language. By "size" I mean the article count and the active editor count.
This begs the question: Is it proportional to anything else?
I can think of a bunch of possible things (to most items you can add "... in the countries where this language is spoken"):
- Penetration of Internet access
- Quality of education
- Number of people who know other major languages, such as English,
French, Russian, Spanish, etc.
- Number of people who *don't* know other major languages
- Gross domestic product
- Human Development Index
- The level of usage of this language in the education system (in some
countries schools function in foreign languages)
- Amount of published literature in that language
- Level of censorship and press freedom
- [[Language planning]] policies (think Catalonia, Ukraine, Quebec, Israel)
It is quite possible that the size of a Wikipedia is proportional not to one of these things, but to a combination of them. It is also possible that it is not proportional to any of the above, or to anything at all.
Did anybody ever try to research this?
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore