Last updated April 2009'
Some Wikipedias are bigger than others. You might suppose that's because there are more Internet users who speak some languages than others. This is somewhat true: the ratio of number of Internet users who speak a language as their primary language to number of articles in that language is generally pretty stable, around 50-150. On the other hand, there are some notable exceptions, as shown in the chart below. Because Internet users already have easy access to Wikipedia, this table also points out areas for improvement, where by focusing our efforts we could benefit the largest possible number of people. (Stats from List of countries by number of Internet users)
My conclusions:
- European nations, especially small ones, tend to have the best ratios. Estonia so far is the best with 12 Internet users per Estonian Wikipedia article.
- Unsurprisingly, the Chinese Government's actions against Wikipedia have severely damaged its presence there; they have nearly as many Internet users as all English-speaking countries combined, yet their Wikipedia is ten times smaller.
- In general, the Indian and Pakistani languages suffer from the worst ratios. This may reflect cultural differences. Oceania and the Middle East fare pretty poorly as well.
| class="wikitable sortable"
!Language !! Internet users !! Wikipedia articles !! Internet users per article |
| All | 1.58 billion | 12 million[According to [http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZZ.htm], there are about 9.2 M without the English Wikipedia, which has 2.8 M. This figure may be somewhat out-of-date. Also, many Internet users are multilingual, so it's somewhat redundant to have articles on the same topic for them in multiple languages.] | 132 |
| Chinese | 315 million[China + Taiwan.] | 243,668 | 1293 |
| English | 307 million[This is an underestimate including just the Internet user populations of the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. This excludes many speakers of English as a secondary language in other nations.] | 2,831,519 | 108 |
| Japanese | 94 million | 577,000 | 163 |
| Hindi | 81 million[This is the count for India. I assume most Internet users in India speak Hindi.] | 29,043 | 2789 |
| Portuguese | 75 million[Brazil + Portugal.] | 471,625 | 159 |
| German | 60M[55M in Germany + 4.65M in Austria.] | 890,462 | 67 |
| French | 51 million[[http://www.worldinternetproject.net/publishedarchive/Canada%20Online%20Final%20English%20Version%2010302005.pdf This report] indicates about 65.7% of the 6.7M French speakers in Canada, or 4.4M, are online. France has another 40M, Belgium another 7 million.] | 788,504 | 65 |
| Spanish | 116 million[129 million in South America, minus 67.5 million in Brazil, plus 27 million in Spain, plus 27.4 million in Mexico, is about 116 million.] | 461,714 | 251 |
| Russian | 38 million[Only counting Russia] | 377,708 | 101 |
| Korean | 37 million[Includes South Korea only. Internet is nearly unavailable in North Korea.] | 94,684 | 391 |
| Italian | 28 million | 557,662 | 50 |
| Turkey | 27 million | 127,024 | 213 |
| Indonesian | 25 million | 101,911 | 245 |
| Arabic | 55.6 million [42 million in Middle East, 3.5 million in Algeria, 6.6 million in Morocco, 3.5 million in Sudan] | 95,388 | 583 |
| Punjabi | 8.8 million[This is the figure for Pakistan divided by 2, since about half of its people are native speakers of Punjabi.] | 2004 | 4391 |
| Vietnamese | 21 million | 79,165 | 265 |
| Polish | 20 million | 595,066 | 34 |
| Malay | 16 million | 37,358 | 428 |
| Filipino | 14 million | 21,578 | 649 |
| Dutch | 13.8 million | 529,366 | 26 |
| Romanian | 7.4 million | 123.115 | 60 |
| Swedish | 7.3 million | 312,094 | 23 |
| Finnish | 4.1 million | 199,779 | 21 |
| Estonian | 760,000 | 61,798 | 12 |
| Greek | 3.8 million | 41,106[Standard Greek edition] | 92 |
| Georgian | 332,000 | 28,929 | 14 |
| Norwegian | 4 million | 213,622[Norwegian has two written forms with two Wikipedias. This is the number for the Bokmål edition (the larger one).] | 19 |