Recently, Erik Zachte released statistics of Wikipedia page views per country & language. Excellently made and much needed, they tell us how should Wikipedias be propagated at local level.
However, the statistics Wikipedia Page Views Per Country – Overview show us page views per person, while I believe a much more useful statistics is page views per Internet user. After all, Wikimedia could do little to increase global Internet usage. And so, as I promised, I merged the statistics with data from the List of countries by number of Internet users. Here they are:
- Wikipedia Page Views Per Country with Internet users (HTML)
- Wikipedia Page Views Per Country with Internet users (ODS)
These statistics paint quite a different picture. There are some anomalies that point to bad geolocation or bad data on number of Internet users; however, it’s clear that there are hundreds of millions of people who could benefit from Wikipedia if only it were more popular in their countries. My conclusions:
- Iran and China are very low, but there’s not much we can do about it.
- There are a number of countries (African, Arabic, India, Indonesia…) with tens of millions of Internet users and relatively few Wikipedia readers. I assume it’s the case of low foreign language knowledge combined with little material on local Wikipedias. Some bootstrapping might help here, such as digitalization of already existing encyclopedias (in PD or by outright buying copyrights), or bot creation of relevant articles.
- Some former Soviet republics are very low, and it’s difficult to see why, as a number of people in them know Russian, and Russian Wikipedia is fairly large.
- There are also hardly explainable differences between countries that should be similar, for example Germany has almost twice as many views as France.
TODO: Install the Language Switcher plugin.
I also worked on this . Will publish tomorrow.
Darn
You should have answered me on the Foundation-l so that we don’t duplicate efforts.
Marketing the good news IS repeating the same message often in other words.. This is a great blogpost .. and it is worthwhile reading it.
Thanks,
GerardM
Wikipedia is a questionable information source at best.
Also, its versions for some locales are politically biased.
Maybe there’s the explanation for different view rates for different locales (BTW, I think measuring view rates by country is wrong; there are users of any particular language in almost any country).
[...] Николин блог Још увек се хватам у коштац са Вордпресом. « Wikipedia Page Views Per Country with Internet users [...]
Foundation-l mailing list moderators often censor posts, without explanation or reply, so it’s often NOT the best place to attempt a discussion or dialog.
Precisely. Additionally, there is little control over the leadership of localized versions of Wikipedia for „small“ locales, which is why it is possible for them to have questionable material.
BTW, Nikola, your backlink script just backlinked *your own* blog.
That is what I wanted.
Nikola, I took yours/Erik’s analysis and turned into a map of Wikipedia usage worldwide. See http://wikistu.org/2010/02/wikipedia-usage-by-country/.