Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-04-01/Special report

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Note: For stats, charts, and graphs see: commons:Category:Wikimedia statistics.

countries such as the Balkan states that were assimilated into the Soviet Union for most of the 20th century - I'm sorry to disappoint you, but there is only one country that formerly belonged to USSR and is close enough to Balkan to be mixed up. That's Moldova. And in its article in en.wiki, Balkan is not even mentioned. Check your facts. --Oop (talk) 13:17, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for being so polite. I erred, of course, in mixing up Balkan and Baltic—call it a typo. Now corrected. Tony (talk) 13:24, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Is the 25% increase in the last year due to link prefetching? Regards, Sun Creator^(talk) 14:05, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

• I think there might have been a minor issue with Hong Kong being listed as a non-English speaking country when considering that it was a British Territory until 1997 and that English is used in there. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 15:41, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

English is one of two official languages in Malta, and 88% of its citizens speak English. Does this qualify it as a "[m]ajority native English-speaking country" (per the first image)? Wrad (talk) 15:57, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

I had in mind that 2% of Hong Kong people are native speakers of English. I suspect that few Maltese are native speakers. Tony (talk) 23:55, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Ok, makes sense. Incidentally, I'm red/green colorblind, and I have trouble distinguishing between lines in some of the lower images. For future Signpost articles, could we use a different color scheme? Wrad (talk) 00:29, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

How are the monthly views exatly measured? Some very interesting results there. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 16:25, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for the interesting investigation. One of the surprising points for me was that Comoros actually have the best viewing-ratio in favor of ar WP, yet in over three years of working there I haven't seen a single Comorian editor, I have thought because of that the french was the dominant language for Comoros. In general, it seems that the more developed and educated Arab countries tends to have lower or average views of ar WP, that sounds interesting. Another point worthes mentioning (inspired by "Chequers" comment below) is that, from my own experience, size and growth of a native language's WP is essential for page views. For example, some articles that was developed from few poor sections to FA level in ar WP (Example) had raised page views as much as 20 times in one year. Better content, Much more visitors --aad_Dira (talk) 08:10, 6 April 2013 (UTC).

Namibia is definitely not a Portuguese-speaking country. I assume the author got confused with the neighbouring country of Angola. LouriePieterse 22:57, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Lourie, you're right to question this. Languages of Namibia says "English, the official language, is spoken by less than 1% of people as their native language. Among the white population, 60% speak Afrikaans, 32% German, 7% English, and 1% Portuguese (current figures show that they are in fact 4–5% of the total population of the country nowadays, i.e. 100,000 people)" (my italics). Nevertheless, the WMF's stats show that the share of views from that country to the Portuguese WP has declined from nearly 10% in 2009 to less than 1% now (put "Namibia" into your finder once you've arrived on that big stats page). Can you shed any light on this? And Erik, I wonder whether it's possible to track down whether the sharp dip in Portuguese WP views throughout the world in 2010 is an artefact of collecting the stats? Tony (talk) 05:59, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

I have a plausible solution to this apparent anomaly. Firstly, I have only quickly looked at the statistics page now, but it would have been nice to see how the total amount of views increased for the country. It is my believe that the amount of Portuguese views stayed relatively the same, but that the other languages increased. I say this because access to internet connectivity increased dramatically in the last few years. It might be possible that the Portuguese views are attributed to higher-class individuals from Angola that only visit Namibia, or even higher-class nationals. Having geolocation information would help with understanding this, as I believe most of this traffic will originate from Windhoek. Secondly, I know some people from Namibia, including a friend who owns an aviation business in the northern areas, but have never heard of Portuguese nationals. I honestly do not know, as I have not even researched my above theory, I only speak out of experience. It is just most plausible in my mind that higher-class Portuguese visitors and nationals are responsible for that traffic and that as more people got access to the internet, that ratio declined. With more statistics, it will be easier to make solid conclusions. :) LouriePieterse 18:58, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

Search engines?

I suspect that some of these transitions are down to search engines. Search engines will vary their results by geography of searcher if they don't have more to go on, and if they shift from defaulting a country to En Wiki to AR wiki then the result could be significant.

Size of native language wiki will also be an issue, for people who speak languages such as Maltese and Slovenian a very high proportion of subjects will not be covered in their native language.

Another thing that will vary over time is the taught foreign language in a country. In much of the former Soviet block anyone born before 1975 will have been educated in a society where Russian was at least the first foreign language one learned, but the younger generation will have probably been taught English. Perversely as the Internet becomes more common in such countries it will spread from the young who usually have some English to the old whose non-native language is Russian. ϢereSpielChequers 08:10, 6 April 2013 (UTC)