Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia articles per population

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[edit] Re-write this page

ok, any Wikiexperts out there, if you could re-write this page... is there a way to make it link with the statistics automatically? cheers...


I moved it out of article namespace -- this is clearly meta-WP stuff. dab () 15:35, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Re-Writing This Page

I'd like to repeat the request right at the top: is there a way to link to the stats automatically? The links to the number of articles in each language include that info, but can the info be displayed directly within the page? For example, the # of Swahili articles shown in the table is 335, whereas the linked raw data shows over 1000.

I want to create a page that keeps track of all African language wikipedias, but there is no point in writing the page unless it is dynamic. And I can think of many similar sorts of pages that would find automated updating capability extremely useful. So, can it be done? Malangali 15:37, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Nynorsk/Bokmål (Norwegian)

I just want to point out a clumsy choice of words in one of the table headings, it says "Total number of speakers". In Norway there are two written language forms (Nynorsk and Bokmål) which are equal in theory. My point is that there are no native speakers of any of the language forms, since they are only two different written standards of a language with really many dialects compared to the population. It should say "total number of native writers" or something like that. Deallus 00:12, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Esperanto is ahead by far

what about esperanto ? And esperanstist speaker ?

I have added Esperanto to the list now. Using Ethnologue's figures for the total number of users, Esperanto gets a score of 10,182. If you use the number of native speakers instead, Esperanto's score rises to somewhere between 10,182,000 and 101,820,000! But that wouldn't be a fair comparison, since unlike languages like Spanish and Japanese, most users of Esperanto are not native speakers. (I am not sure about English.)
--Verdlanco (talk) 17:58, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I suspected some of the smaller languages of northern Europe might be high up, such as Frisian, Estonian, and Nynorsk, and as you'll see from the figures I've added this tends to be the case, with Luxembourgish doing better even than Esperanto. The 2 million figure we're using here is a high estimate, however, and the real number of speakers is probably much less (see the Esperanto article for more on the differing estimates). I've cut the estimate to 1 million which is probably nearer the mark, and Esperanto miraculously jumps up to the top again, exceeding Luxembourgish by a mile. It just goes to show what an inexact science this is. The impressiveness of the English Wikipedia, for example, is probably overestimated because lots of educated Europeans who speak fluent English as a second language (and therefore aren't included in the 400 million figure) contribute to en: rather than their own native language Wikipedias. English is so widespread as a second language that these calculations can break down. — Trilobite (Talk) 08:05, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Source(s) for numbers of speakers ?

We have to use the same source for all languages, to be consistent. I used Wikipedia. Yann

In that case, the results for Esperanto _must_ be bogus, since I doubt there are anywhere near that many native Esperanto speakers. (Who learns it as a first language?) jdb ❋ (talk) 08:12, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I have the following comments:

  1. I read another statistic somewhere that Esperanto is spoken by 2-3 million people worldwide and the wikipedia article states 2 milion.
  2. I strongly disagree with the 12 million bulgarian speakers of the language. The real figure is no more than 10. Look at the wikipedia article again.
  3. I disagree with the hebrew estimations, should be at least 10mil. All the people around the world that speak it should be counted, not just those in Israel.
  4. 402 million for English underestimating. I am not a native speaker, yet I have written some articles and I believe many people write articles in languages other than their native. The population of the US is 290mln, Britain - 60mln. Canada - 32, Australia - 20, Jamaica - 2, New Zealand - 5 plus some minor colonies so the total is at least 410mln if you dont include some maybe 600-700mln others that can speak and write perfectly well.

Smartech 18:35, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] second language speakers

I think that in this article we must use the first language + second language speakers number. Because all that people can write articles. Yes, in Europe a lot of people is writting articles in the english wikipedia. So I change the number of people of Sankrit from 2000 to 200.000 that are the real speakers of the language.

[edit] Pennsylvania Dutch Wikipedia

I listed the numbers for the Pennsylvania Dutch Wikipedia, even though it is technically not at pdc.wikipedia.org yet, it has been accepted to be moved to wikipedia.org and is just waiting for a developer since october. Of course these statistics do not take into account the fact that the majority of the 300,000 speakers do not have home computers Stettlerj 18:48, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ido?

With max 2500 speakers and 13188 articles, Ido is the clear champion. Why is it missing from the table?

[edit] Full update

I've made total rewrite of the table.
Main changes are:

  • Total number of speakers is used for every language, including Second language speakers. Source for numbers is Wikipedia, in particular: List of languages by total speakers and separate english articles about every language. Previous version of this list counted only native speakers.
  • Number of languages increased from 65 to 130.
  • Added fresh stats (for today) about all Wikipedia projects from m:List of Wikipedias.
  • Links to every Wikipedia project added.

Excluded languages:

  • Simple English (8083 articles) - simplified English (only for educational purpose)
  • Latin (4868) - old language with unknown speakers
  • Serbo-Croatian (3465) - unknown speakers, because most of them identify their language as Serbian, Bosnian or Croatian - all are included separately
  • Anglo-Saxon (652) - old language
  • Moldovan (358) - now combined into Romanian Wikipedia
  • Lombard (284) - minority language in Italy and Switzerland
  • Interlingue (264) - constructed language
  • Norman (244) - old language
  • Lojban (222) - constructed language
  • All other languages (about 100 variants), whose Wikipedias contain less than 100 articles.

Included constructed languages are: Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua, because of relatively high popularity.
I wish also include Latin and Serbo-Croatian, if somebody suggest at least approximate speaker count.

Also I suggest, that total number of English speakers is about 1 billion. Distinctly, there are 380 million native english speakers and from 150 million to 1 billion Second language speakers (by different sources and counting rules). For details look here: English language.

While I don't know how to automate full updates of this list in the future, it will be more objective, if you won't update data just for several languages. So if you want to update - do it for all languages in one step. I also mentioned, that somebody do everyday automatic updates for m:List of Wikipedias - maybe he or she can use the same bot to update this article too.

--Alexey Petrov 11:15, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

On the contrary, Norman is very much a living language, spoken in the Channel Islands and Normandy! (Anglo-Norman, however, the ruling language of England for a time, is quite dead. The wikipedia is not in Anglo-Norman, however). Speakership of Jèrriais (Jersey Norman) is at around 2,600 (though this may be a low figure—it represents those who use the language daily). In Guernsey, there are a reported 1,327 fluent Norman speakers (and maybe half that again who are not fluent). On Sark, speakership is only about 15. On Normandy proper, no reliable data is available (France does not, as of yet, recognize Norman as a regional language), but the Magène website estimates Norman speakership at 20,000, which I find a plausible figure. The Jade Knight 08:18, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Having looked over the Ido wikipedia, I think it might not be fair to include it. Most wikipedias exclude stubs from its list of "articles". Ido doesn't seem to have any sort of "stub" system, so the majority of its "articles" are only a couple of sentences long. Tomos ANTIGUA Tomos 13:20, 1 February 2007

[edit] Nauruan

Okay... And WHERE is Nauruan? Belgian man 18:34, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Update badly needed

The list is completely outdated and should be updated. I just made the table sortable, and modified the "total number of speakers" numbers by adding commas in them so they sort out correctly. ---Majestic- 01:29, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 2 Languages missing

2 Languages are missing:

Lao - 5,225,552 speakers, 215 Wikipedia articles. Khmer - 21,600,000 speakers, 325 Wikipedia articles.

Dantilley 06:38, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Actually, it misses a whole list of languages. --LA2 (talk) 02:00, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
Rank among Wikipedias
by page views
Language code Language name Number of speakers
98 bat-smg Samogitian dialect 500,000
101 kk Kazakh language 12,000,000
109 vls West Flemish 1,160,000
112 nov Novial 0
114 hsb Upper Sorbian 55,000
120 nds-nl Dutch Low Saxon  ???
123 bar Austro-Bavarian 12,000,000
131 ang Old English language (Anglo-Saxon) 0 (extinct)
133 lij Ligurian language 0 (extinct)
139 bh Bihari languages 52,000,000
147 wuu Wu (linguistics) 77,000,000
148 tk Turkmen language 9,000,000
149 jbo Lojban 0
153 wo Wolof language 6,700,000
154 gv Manx language 1745
155 so Somali language 10,000,000
156 arc Assyrian Neo-Aramaic 210,000
157 ty Tahitian language 120,000
159 tet Tetum 800,000
160 ig Igbo language 20,000,000
161 ay Aymara language 2,200,000
163 ie Occidental language 0
164 cu Old Church Slavonic 0 (liturgical only)
165 rmy Romani language 4,800,000
166 cbk-zam Chavacano language 607,000
169 roa-rup
170 zea
171 ky
172 eml
174 bo
180 ug
183 sd
185 gn
186 ee
187 km
188 kab
189 crh
190 dsb
191 av
192 hak
194 bcl
196 za
197 ch
198 cdo
199 zu
201 chr
202 kg
203 sm
204 haw
206 my
208 got
209 or
210 pap
211 nv
212 cr
213 glk
214 om
218 kr
219 mzn
220 roa-tara
221 sg
222 pih
223 ss
224 dz
225 kl
226 rw
227 bug
228 ng
229 xh
230 ts
231 aa
232 ik
233 ab
234 stq
235 lbe
237 kv
238 ha
239 ff
240 tlh
241 tw
243 xal
244 mh
245 ti
246 bi
247 ii
248 fj
249 ny
250 lg
251 bxr
252 chy
253 tn
254 ak
255 mus
256 rn
257 ki
258 sn
259 kj
260 tum
261 cho
262 hz
264 ho
273 ji
281 gs
282 oit

[edit] Upper Sorbian

The Upper Sorbian language (hsb:) is also missing. With a number of about 50.000 speakers in total and more than 3.000 articles they should be in a quite good position. Thanks. --193.251.160.225 20:52, 26 September 2007 (UTC)