Archive for Multilingual statistics discussion page (pre-2004)

Is there a special reason why the stats of the English Wikipedia is not listed? giskart 11:42 Jan 16, 2003 (UTC)

It originally treated them newfangled ferrin Wikipedias as a separate lump. Feel free to add back stats for the one with the language of a small island nation off the coast of a peninsula on the western edge of Asia. ;) --Brion

Could someone list the statistics of how many articles are crosslinked to other languages? Also, it would be interesting to know which articles are in the most languages, etc. --Chuck SMITH


Somebody please check my math: I added the total number of articles on the Jan 11 row and got 37,033 articles. I also calculated the number of articles that have been added since Jan 12 of last year and got 32,921 articles. It is important that these numbers are correct since I used them as the basis for an edit to our 2003 Press Release. --mav

I count 37,072 articles in total on Jan 11. Even with the two recently added wikis (fi & ko) subtracted it yields 37,041 articles. Total number of articles on Jan 12 2002 was 3,767, giving an increase of 33,305 articles. Would you perhaps like an up-to-date list? -Scipius 17:10 Jan 18, 2003 (UTC)
Good. I wasn't that far off - thanks for checking that for me. Yes, if possible, it would be nice to have more up-to-date numbers. --mav

Hey! The Swedes may feel a little indignant with the phrase - "Swedish (Suomi)". After all, it was Sweden that had been dominating Finland. Kpjas 18:41 Jan 25, 2003 (UTC)


Hi, Some Wikipedia (at least the "fr") still used the comma method to choose if an article is to be included or not in the total count. So may be the phrase should reworded ? Yann

As far as I know the French wiki uses the same counting method as all other Phase III wikis, or is there something different about it? Some smaller non-converted wikis are still forced to use the comma method, but I think it's clear that eventually (right, Brion? ;)) all wikis will be converted and the comma method will be history. -Scipius 21:04 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)
we are obviously not sure at all about that. So unsure someone recently hunted the missing commas in all articles, ie, he added commas in all stubs that count as articles to be sure no articles (even ridiculously short) would be missing in the count. That is how the french Wikipedia:self-reference is now stating we are a place where we hunts for commas :-)

bs.wikipedia is missing from the table although they have now 14 articles. Could someone remedy this for next time?

Done. I've furthermore added the Croatian and Serbian wikis to the inactive, but converted list and placed a bit more info at their Main Pages. -Scipius 21:04 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

In the recent update of stats, the question regarding inclusion of Volapük and Swahili Wikipedias was raised since these have barely started to put up content. I'd like to mention that these two Wikipedias have had some visits and interest shown. The starting process may be slow now, but in comparison to the Interlingua Wikipedia which was very slow then gained incredible speed just lately can vouch for the fact that having stats on these languages can encourage user communities to get up and go make articles.

Also if I could bring this up, the Galego Wikipedia has had good progress of late and I would like to see it included in the stats as well.

Jay B. 2003/4/18

The problem is that they do not appear to have real encyclopedic content, which disqualifies them IMO. The situation is even worse for the Swahili wiki as it appears that the dictionary entries it does have seem to have been copied from the copyrighted site linked on the front page. The Volapük wiki appears closer and I'm sure it can be added in some future update, provided we see some more encyclopedic content added.
As for recognition, this is partly why I mentioned them and I hope the note and this discussion will spur on any contributors to make some genuine encyclopedic entries. As for the Galician wiki, look more closely, I added it during the last update ;) -Scipius 20:59 Apr 20, 2003 (UTC)

Malayalam Wikipedia has around 10 articles. Would you consider including this? ~Vinodmp 17 May, 2003

Certainly, though I can't read a thing (it's mostly ????), it looks like it has some encyclopedic content and a usable front page. I'll add it in the next update next week, if no-one else does so before me. Thanks for the alert. -Scipius 20:20 18 May 2003 (UTC)

Isn't it time for an update of the statistics now? Den fjättrade ankan 16:21 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Have fun! --mav

Welsh Wikipedia has around 60 articles and 7 contributors now (though things like translating the GNU FDL are slowing it down a bit!). Would you consider including it in the stats? -- Arwel 22:04, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Done. But thers is only 25 valid pages, according to the Special:Statistics page for the Welsh Wikipedia. Den fjättrade ankan 21:49, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Thanks. Looking at the "All Pages" display I'd say there are currently 28 pages which aren't to do with Wikipedia or User pages. Arwel 22:17, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)

How is the average growth calculated? By adding all the growths of the Wikipedias together and then divising by the number, or by adding the number of articles of all the Wikipedias and calculating this numbers growth? --denny vrandecic 22:49, Oct 19, 2003 (UTC)

Average growth is calculated by adding the number of articles of all Wikipedias together, and then calculating the growth of this number. Of course, growth is not calculated by adding the growths of the Wikipedias together and dividing the number. This is due to the fact that average growth is meant to represent the speed at which the entire Wikipedia project grows.

Ronline, 19 Oct 2003

good. :) --denny vrandecic 15:03, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)

Is it possible to have a multilingual comparison in terms of the total amount of information, in the number of symbols? Andres 20:36, 21 Oct 2003 (UTC)

There are stats concerning number of words,database size, etc, in the "new" stats run on Erik Zachte's servers. These aren't particularly up to date or accurate, but have good figures.

Ronline, 19 Oct 2003

Thanks a lot. Andres 01:41, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC)
The stats are on the Wikipedia server at [1], and are (usually) updated weekly. I haven't had any complaints about their accuracy/bug reports in months. If someone spots a mistake I will be happy to hear it (Ronline?). The stats on my server are for testing only. Erik Zachte 13:43, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC)
I'm not sure the "50 recently active wikipedians" section is accurate. Wikipedians by number of edits was last updated on August 8 and claims, for example, that mav had 43533 edits, whereas the stats page says he only has 32512. Angela 16:02, Oct 25, 2003 (UTC)
This has been brought up before. It is a matter of definition of what to count. So actually it is a bug in the documentation :) I will add a description of what I count specifically, which is only namespace zero edits (as opposed to the online counter). In less technical terms this means only edits on real articles/redirects, not on discussion pages, image upload pages and what have you. Thanks for reminding me. Erik Zachte 17:05, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC)
Erik - I didn't mean to say that there were bugs with the stats. All I meant was that they weren't as frequently updated as the Article count stats (which are updated every 2-3 days) and also that, in terms of accuracy, articles are only given to the nearest thousand after they pass the 1000 mark. For example, if an encyclopedia has 1200 articles and moves up to 1400, it's still quoted as having "1 K" articles. Other than that, they are great for seeing database size, etc,but for actual article count, I think it's better to use the more simple stats on this page. By the way, I have reviewed the Romanian stats page and it's in order. I think it's ready to be put up off the testing server. Cheers, Ronline

Fastest Growing Wikipedias

How can I update this paragraph for Nov. 2003? ^^ Dod1 16:23, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)