Sure English has the most entries in Wikipedia - 1.3 million at last count - but we also have half a billion native speakers around the world. In fact, it takes 250 Internet users to produce a single English entry on Wikipedia.
So which country is the most prolific? A mere 2 million Slovenians have cranked out 32,000 entries, and they only needed an average of 30 Internet users to write each entry.
And 8.8 million Swedes have produced a whopping 177,000 entries. So if anyone ever asks you how many Swedes it takes to screw in a Wikipedia entry on lightbulbs, the answer is 50. The punchline is that it takes 389 English speakers and more than 11,000 Chinese speakers to do the same. This is hardly surprising given that Sweden is one of the most industrious and entrepreneurial countries in the world, home of Ikea, Volvo and the Swedish Chef.
But look out for the Lusophones. The 210 million Brazilians and Portuguese have produced 169,000 Wikipedia entries so far, and while they’re not the most efficient, that’s still an impressive 28% increase in entries since April, 2006.
Here are the top 25 languages used to write Wikipedia entries. The first statastic is a snapshot of which native speakers produce the most entries per capita. The second measure shows how productive the language groups are given their access to the Internet.
Sources: Statastic research, Wikipedia, World Bank, United Nations Millennium Devlopment Goals Indicators
Notes: Chinese speakers count Mandarin and Cantonese.
Internet usage: Wikipedia entries as of August 9, 2006. Internet usage data is from 2004. In cases where a language spans several countries, a weighted average was used to determine estimated Internet usage data for a language group.
Of course this analysis ignores the law of diminishing returns, as you get more entries in a language, fewer are needed.
August 10th, 2006, at 12:27 pm #Diminishing returns is indeed important, but I’m not sure that we’ve hit that point on the curve just yet with regards to Wikipedia entries.
A recent Atlantic Monthly article quoted a Polish Wikipedian named Krzysztof Jasiutowicz as saying that the Internet was nothing but a “global Wikipedia without the end-user editing facility.” So if Wikipedia ends up reflecting the number of web pages, there are millions of entries left to write in the English Wikipedia. True, the English Wikipedians have picked the low-hanging fruit. But the numbers don’t necessarily reflect the law of diminishing returns just yet.
Here’s the data for the top 25 Wikipedia languages by number of entries, per capita, and per Internet user (which puts low-income, high-population countries like China on more equal footing). Despite the law of diminishing returns, you’ll notice that the Scandinavian languages still have a much higher participation rate compared to Wikipedias with a similar number of entries. There are some other obvious factors at work here: percentage of workforce at desk jobs, GDP per capita, and the date that Wikipedia was started in their language. Though I’m not sure what explains the relatively low participation rate in Japan. And Korea didn’t even make the top 25.
August 10th, 2006, at 3:40 pm #