arpad: (Default)
arpad ([personal profile] arpad) wrote2006-09-09 10:26 am

Wiki advancement ratios

Today I checked Wikipedia statistics for different languages. Quite interesting:

by number of articles
by edits per article
by starting time
by traffic

Hebrew is rated fairly mediocre by number of articles (19-th place with ~43,800). On other hand we have a pretty good rates of edits-per-article and articles-per-total-pages-number and our Wiki started relatively late at July 2003. Thus the community seems to be strong and Hebrew Wiki shows a good prospect.

Polish Wiki have an unusually high number of articles and good traffic rate, but other ratings are lower.

Russian and Spanish show less progress than I expected.

And Arabic is just where I expected it to be - at 34-th place. I suppose all these princes with their cars, falcons and rifles don't have time to use computers. No single rich guy to pay pitiful $50,000 or so for transfer of a printed encyclopedia into Wiki engine just to save a face. Bah.

[identity profile] dimrub.livejournal.com 2006-09-09 09:26 am (UTC)(link)
No single rich guy to pay pitiful $50,000 or so for transfer of a printed encyclopedia into Wiki engine just to save a face. Bah.

I don't think it's as simple as that. Not many encyclopaedia articles are up to Wiki standards, so it's more work than there seems to be at first glance.

[identity profile] arpad.livejournal.com 2006-09-09 05:53 pm (UTC)(link)
But number of unemployed people there is huge and wages are low. Yes, IMO it is as simple as that - you don't need to be great scholar to add cross-links into an article. Also WIki take articles in wrong format - one can just mark them as "waiting to be wikified"

[identity profile] yms.livejournal.com 2006-09-09 10:58 am (UTC)(link)
for transfer of a printed encyclopedia into Wiki engine

Do you mean transfer copyrighted material from printed Arabic encyclopedia to public domain costs as little as $50,000?

[identity profile] arpad.livejournal.com 2006-09-09 05:41 pm (UTC)(link)
As far as I know "copyright" development in Arab world is very weak. One can just steal the data and not worry about reparations.

Or one can just take some old edition not covered by copyright. Therefore all you need is scaner and several non-employed students.

[identity profile] yms.livejournal.com 2006-09-09 06:06 pm (UTC)(link)
Wikipedia is hosted in US, so it would be violation of American laws. Copyright principles in Wikipedia are common for all languages.

[identity profile] arpad.livejournal.com 2006-09-09 06:11 pm (UTC)(link)
One should catch the perpetrator first. And again - you can take pre-copyright edition and lots of articles there will still be releveant.

[identity profile] ygam.livejournal.com 2006-09-09 04:20 pm (UTC)(link)
Hindi, with 800 million speakers, is number 96.

[identity profile] arpad.livejournal.com 2006-09-09 05:44 pm (UTC)(link)
You should take into account that in India/Pakistan English is still used as main communication tool between educated people.