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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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

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).[reply]

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)[reply]

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. Ϣere SpielChequers 08:10, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]