Wikipedia is often referred to as the "Sum of all human knowledge". While Wikipedia is a very good resource for English articles, I recently wondered if how well-represented other languages were. On Wikipedia I pulled up a list of most spoken languages in the World. Next, I checked the number of articles and users for each of the top 20 spoken languages in the world.
The following graph shows the languages ordered by the ratio of number of articles to the number of speakers.
It is interesting to find that the European languages (French, German, English Italian, Portuguese, Spanish) have a large number of articles. Japanese is also well represented in terms of the number of articles.
Next graph shows Languages ordered by the Number of Users on Wikipedia to the Number of speakers.
A few points that are striking from these graphs:
- English and European languages speakers are quite prolific on Wikipedia. This is not surprising since Wikipedia also receives most of its traffic from English subdomain (See note below).
- Chinese, despite being such a widely spoken language is clearly way behind in terms of Wikipedia articles as well as users. This is probably because of the Chinese government's policy of blocking Wikipedia.
- Surprisingly, Arabic also has very few articles and users. I am not sure why there is very little participation from Arabic community in Wikipedia.
- Indian languages (Like Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Bengali and Punjabi) are among the top 20 world languages, in terms of its speakers. However, since many Indians often communicate online in English, the number of articles contributed in these native languages is not very high.
Also From the Wikipedia page:
"According to Alexa, the English subdomain (en.wikipedia.org) receives approximately 55% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages (Spanish: 17%, Japanese 4%, German: 4%, Polish: 3%, French: 3%, Portuguese: 2%).[1] As of December 2007, the five largest language editions are (in order of article count) English, German, French, Polish and Japanese Wikipedias.[55]"
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Posted by: Daniel | May 23, 2008 at 12:00 PM