[Wikipedia-l] Mediametry survey (was )Re: Language versions' popularity vs. number of articles...)

Wed Mar 29 20:48:58 UTC 2006

That's certainly a good point.

Unfortunately, the most recent statistics we have for site visits are
from October 2004 but they are as follows:

1 English: 42.75%
2 Japanese: 14.72%
3 German: 13.74%
4 Spanish: 5.34%
5 French: 4.14%
6 Polish: 3.93%
7 Dutch: 2.94%
8 Swedish: 1.74%
9 Chinese: 1.42%
10 Italian: 1.20%
11 Portuguese: 1.20%
12 Hebrew: 0.94%
13 Danish: 0.53%
14 Finnish: 0.52%
15 Esperanto: 0.32%
16 Norwegian: 0.28%
17 Russian: 0.25%
18 Arabic: 0.25%
19 Slovene: 0.23%
20 Catalan: 0.21%
21 Korean: 0.16%
22 Malaysian: 0.16%
23 Bulgarian: 0.15%
24 Romanian: 0.15%
25 Simple: 0.14%
26 Czech: 0.13%
27 Hungarian: 0.13%
28 Indonesian: 0.13%
29 Estonian: 0.12%
30 Interlingua: 0.12%
31 Croatian: 0.11%
32 Turkish: 0.10%
33 Farsi: 0.10%

This still raises some questions; for example the Catalan WP has over
20k articles while the Arabic WP has just over 10k; numbers for
Chinese, Spanish, and even Japanese (!) are similarly incongruent.

Mark

On 29/03/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Mark Williamson wrote:
> > Hi everybody,
> >
> > While it's sort of obvious, given the digital divide, that the number
> > of articles in Wikipedias is not proportional to the number of
> > speakers, for example Hindi has a much smaller number of articles
> > compared to speakers than most active Wikipedias; German has more.
> >
> > However, something that people may not notice as much is the
> > incongruency between popularity of a particular language version and
> > the number of articles in that version.
> >
> > The most visited Wikipedias, in order, are:
> >
> > 1 English (65%)
> > 2 German (10%)
> > 3 Japanese (6%)
> > 4 Spanish (3%)
> > 5 French (2%)
> > 6 Polish (2%)
> > 7 Chinese (2%)
> > 8 Arabic (2%)
> > 9 Italian (1%)
> > 10 Hebrew (1%)
> > 11 Turkish (1%)
> > 12 Dutch (1%)
> > 13 Portuguese (1%)
> > (all others combined total 1% of visits)
> >
> > On the other hand, the list of Wikipedias ranked by number of articles is:
> > 1 English (1048.7K)
> > 2 German (376.9K)
> > 3 French (261.1K)
> > 4 Polish (223.8K)
> > 5 Japanese (196.3K)
> > 6 Dutch (156.9K)
> > ...
> > 8 Italian (146.8K)
> > 9 Portuguese (123.8K)
> > 10 Spanish (105.0K)
> > ...
> > 12 Chinese (61.48K)
> > ...
> > 17 Hebrew (34.35K)
> > ...
> > 29 Turkish (19.94K)
> > ...
> > 37 Arabic (12.03K)
>
> Hi
>
> By the way, I have wondered for a long time how it could be that the
> french wikipedia be the third largest (which is a fact)... and only
> supposingly 2% of the visits. I also remember that meta had very
> significantly more visits than the french wikipedia. Which.. to me... is
> not something I *believe*.
>
> Answer : these values are collected strictly thanks to the use of the
> Alexa bar...; which is apparently very little used at least in France.
> Hence possibly messing up the statistics. It might well be the same for
> other languages, in particular those for which the Alexa bar... is
> simply not working/translated. So... be careful with the use of the
> Alexa data. They are a very interesting feedback... but also to take
> with a pinch of salt.
>
> By the way, there was recently a study by Mediametry (a statistical
> agency, making polls. In France, probably the largest and most famous one).
>
> The study showed this
>
>         déc. 2004       avr. 2005       août 2005       déc. 2005
> USA     4 544 000       6 753 000       11 874 000      17 498 000
> Germany 1 707 000       2 956 000       4 502 000       5 529 000
> France  681 000         1 169 000       1 429 000       2 421 000
> UK      540 000         766 000         1 525 000       2 298 000
>
>
> Please see that :
> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mediametrie+wikipedia&btnG=Google+Search
>
> anthere
>
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"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin