User:Dcoetzee/Speakers per articles on Wikipedia

When asked why, say, the Croatian or Latvian Wikipedias have less articles than the English or German Wikipedias, the obvious answer is: not as many people speak those languages. One might ask then, is the number of native speakers per article relatively constant across projects?

The answer is "no", and it's interesting to compare which have more or less speakers per article. This could be one rough measure of the participation of a particular language community in their respective Wikipedia project, or perhaps of how inclusionist each project is. Often this factor is related to the economic state of a particular nation, or how widespread and affordable Internet access is there.

Following is a list, based on the List of Wikipedias table from meta, for all Wikipedias with at least a thousand articles. Two figures are given, one counting only native speakers and one counting all speakers (including those learning it as a secondary language), sorted by the number of native speakers per article.

Last updated: February 20, 2007