Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia articles per population

Re-write this page
ok, any Wikiexperts out there, if you could re-write this page... is there a way to make it link with the statistics automatically? cheers...


 * I moved it out of article namespace -- this is clearly meta-WP stuff. dab (&#5839;) 15:35, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Re-Writing This Page
I'd like to repeat the request right at the top: is there a way to link to the stats automatically? The links to the number of articles in each language include that info, but can the info be displayed directly within the page? For example, the # of Swahili articles shown in the table is 335, whereas the linked raw data shows over 1000.

I want to create a page that keeps track of all African language wikipedias, but there is no point in writing the page unless it is dynamic. And I can think of many similar sorts of pages that would find automated updating capability extremely useful. So, can it be done? Malangali 15:37, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Nynorsk/Bokmål (Norwegian)
I just want to point out a clumsy choice of words in one of the table headings, it says "Total number of speakers". In Norway there are two written language forms (Nynorsk and Bokmål) which are equal in theory. My point is that there are no native speakers of any of the language forms, since they are only two different written standards of a language with really many dialects compared to the population. It should say "total number of native writers" or something like that. Deallus 00:12, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Esperanto is ahead by far
what about esperanto ? And esperanstist speaker ?


 * I have added Esperanto to the list now. Using Ethnologue's figures for the total number of users, Esperanto gets a score of 10,182. If you use the number of native speakers instead, Esperanto's score rises to somewhere between 10,182,000 and 101,820,000!  But that wouldn't be a fair comparison, since unlike languages like Spanish and Japanese, most users of Esperanto are not native speakers.  (I am not sure about English.)
 * --Verdlanco (talk) 17:58, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * I suspected some of the smaller languages of northern Europe might be high up, such as Frisian, Estonian, and Nynorsk, and as you'll see from the figures I've added this tends to be the case, with Luxembourgish doing better even than Esperanto. The 2 million figure we're using here is a high estimate, however, and the real number of speakers is probably much less (see the Esperanto article for more on the differing estimates). I've cut the estimate to 1 million which is probably nearer the mark, and Esperanto miraculously jumps up to the top again, exceeding Luxembourgish by a mile. It just goes to show what an inexact science this is. The impressiveness of the English Wikipedia, for example, is probably overestimated because lots of educated Europeans who speak fluent English as a second language (and therefore aren't included in the 400 million figure) contribute to en: rather than their own native language Wikipedias. English is so widespread as a second language that these calculations can break down. &mdash; Trilobite (Talk) 08:05, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Source(s) for numbers of speakers ?
We have to use the same source for all languages, to be consistent. I used Wikipedia. Yann


 * In that case, the results for Esperanto _must_ be bogus, since I doubt there are anywhere near that many native Esperanto speakers. (Who learns it as a first language?) jdb &#x274b; (talk) 08:12, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I have the following comments:
 * 1) I read another statistic somewhere that Esperanto is spoken by 2-3 million people worldwide and the wikipedia article states 2 milion.
 * 2) I strongly disagree with the 12 million bulgarian speakers of the language. The real figure is no more than 10. Look at the wikipedia article again.
 * 3) I disagree with the hebrew estimations, should be at least 10mil. All the people around the world that speak it should be counted, not just those in Israel.
 * 4) 402 million for English underestimating. I am not a native speaker, yet I have written some articles and I believe many people write articles in languages other than their native. The population of the US is 290mln, Britain - 60mln. Canada - 32, Australia - 20, Jamaica - 2, New Zealand - 5 plus some minor colonies so the total is at least 410mln if you dont include some maybe 600-700mln others that can speak and write perfectly well.

Smartech 18:35, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

second language speakers
I think that in this article we must use the first language + second language speakers number. Because all that people can write articles. Yes, in Europe a lot of people is writting articles in the english wikipedia. So I change the number of people of Sankrit from 2000 to 200.000 that are the real speakers of the language.

Pennsylvania Dutch Wikipedia
I listed the numbers for the Pennsylvania Dutch Wikipedia, even though it is technically not at pdc.wikipedia.org yet, it has been accepted to be moved to wikipedia.org and is just waiting for a developer since october. Of course these statistics do not take into account the fact that the majority of the 300,000 speakers do not have home computers Stettlerj 18:48, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Ido?
With max 2500 speakers and 13188 articles, Ido is the clear champion. Why is it missing from the table?

Full update
I've made total rewrite of the table. Main changes are:
 * Total number of speakers is used for every language, including Second language speakers. Source for numbers is Wikipedia, in particular: List of languages by total speakers and separate english articles about every language. Previous version of this list counted only native speakers.
 * Number of languages increased from 65 to 130.
 * Added fresh stats (for today) about all Wikipedia projects from List of Wikipedias.
 * Links to every Wikipedia project added.

Excluded languages:
 * Simple English (8083 articles) - simplified English (only for educational purpose)
 * Latin (4868) - old language with unknown speakers
 * Serbo-Croatian (3465) - unknown speakers, because most of them identify their language as Serbian, Bosnian or Croatian - all are included separately
 * Anglo-Saxon (652) - old language
 * Moldovan (358) - now combined into Romanian Wikipedia
 * Lombard (284) - minority language in Italy and Switzerland
 * Interlingue (264) - constructed language
 * Norman (244) - old language
 * Lojban (222) - constructed language
 * All other languages (about 100 variants), whose Wikipedias contain less than 100 articles.

Included constructed languages are: Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua, because of relatively high popularity. I wish also include Latin and Serbo-Croatian, if somebody suggest at least approximate speaker count.

Also I suggest, that total number of English speakers is about 1 billion. Distinctly, there are 380 million native english speakers and from 150 million to 1 billion Second language speakers (by different sources and counting rules). For details look here: English language.

While I don't know how to automate full updates of this list in the future, it will be more objective, if you won't update data just for several languages. So if you want to update - do it for all languages in one step. I also mentioned, that somebody do everyday automatic updates for List of Wikipedias - maybe he or she can use the same bot to update this article too.

--Alexey Petrov 11:15, 8 April 2006 (UTC)


 * On the contrary, Norman is very much a living language, spoken in the Channel Islands and Normandy! (Anglo-Norman, however, the ruling language of England for a time, is quite dead.  The wikipedia is not in Anglo-Norman, however).  Speakership of Jèrriais (Jersey Norman) is at around 2,600 (though this may be a low figure—it represents those who use the language daily).  In Guernsey, there are a reported 1,327 fluent Norman speakers (and maybe half that again who are not fluent).  On Sark, speakership is only about 15.  On Normandy proper, no reliable data is available (France does not, as of yet, recognize Norman as a regional language), but the Magène website estimates Norman speakership at 20,000, which I find a plausible figure.  The Jade Knight 08:18, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Having looked over the Ido wikipedia, I think it might not be fair to include it. Most wikipedias exclude stubs from its list of "articles". Ido doesn't seem to have any sort of "stub" system, so the majority of its "articles" are only a couple of sentences long. Tomos ANTIGUA Tomos 13:20, 1 February 2007

Nauruan
Okay... And WHERE is Nauruan? Belgian man 18:34, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Update badly needed
The list is completely outdated and should be updated. I just made the table sortable, and modified the "total number of speakers" numbers by adding commas in them so they sort out correctly. ---Majestic- 01:29, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

2 Languages missing
2 Languages are missing:

Lao - 5,225,552 speakers, 215 Wikipedia articles. Khmer - 21,600,000 speakers, 325 Wikipedia articles.

Dantilley 06:38, 21 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Actually, it misses a whole list of languages. --LA2 (talk) 02:00, 7 February 2008 (UTC)


 * There seems to be an error in the above listing. The Ligurian Wikipedia is not in the extinct Ligurian language, but in the modern Romance language of Liguria (spoken in Italy, France and Monaco), which, according to the List of languages by number of native speakers, has 1,920,848 native speakers, not 0! Pasquale (talk) 16:13, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Upper Sorbian
The Upper Sorbian language (hsb:) is also missing. With a number of about 50.000 speakers in total and more than 3.000 articles they should be in a quite good position. Thanks. --193.251.160.225 20:52, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Sater Frisian
Sater Frisian stq: is also missing. With 2250 speakers and 871 articles it would gain 387.000 art/million, also second in row of living languages. --84.81.82.245 (talk) 13:33, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Redirect to Meta-Wiki?
Meta-Wiki has a similar statistic: List of Wikipedias by speakers per article--Kristoffer hh (talk) 20:36, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
 * ✅ I was about to suggest the same thing. --Iketsi (talk) 21:40, 23 April 2012 (UTC)