de.wikipedia.org

Monday, August 14. 2006

We're on vacation in Germany, and had a fun talk with friend Thomas Maier, a journalist with Deutche Presse-Agenture, about the German Wikipedia community. Thomas related how enthusiastic and active is the Wikipedia community in Germany - saying something like "we (Germans) just love this kind of thing!" (Thomas wrote about Wikipedia in conjunction with the 2005 Wikipedia congress in Frankfurt.

I grabbed some Wikipedia stats and meshed them with data on world language speakers, and my resulting graph below shows the German Wikipedia to have more articles per million speakers than English or any of the other major ten spoken languages.

I also looked at "very active contributors" (May 2006 data) per million speakers, and German (8.2) and English (8.6) are well ahead of French (4.7) and all other top languages (less than 1.0).

Thomas is really on to something - this level of activity and participation in the German language Wikipedia.

Interesting side note - very impressive live stats provided by Wikipedia.

Some related info:
Web 2.0 in Germany - blog comments
German edition of Wikipedia will soon create "stable entries" of articles.
Wales speech at Wikimania 2006, notes by Ethan Zuckerman
Contribution patterns on Wikipedia, blog post by Ross Mayfield

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Wikipedia
German Wikipedia
de.wikipedia.org

Posted by Chris Wolz at 02:25 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Influence covers innovations in communication, Internet technology and strategy to generate influence on important public policy issues. Chris Wolz manages this blog with the help of his colleagues at Forum One Communications, a web strategy/technology firm in the Washington DC area.