Here are the statistics of Indic language Wikipedias for the month of October 2011. The data for this report is taken from http://stats.wikimedia.org/

I have restructured my report to make it shorter and easier to read and compare – but without losing any of the data points. I have divided it into Quality of Projects, Community Building, and Readership.

NOTE: I have used the Indian way way of denoting large numbers: Crore is equal to 10 million, and Lakh is 100,000.

Community

In the table below are new users who have edited at least 10 times, existing editors with at least 5 edits in that month, and existing editors with more than 100 edits in that month. Once again, it is essential to look at all three numbers in connjuction with each other.

Something that I have been reflecting on is how even in relatively small communities (which is what almost all Indic communities are) there is still a relatively low number of new users coming on board and a very tiny number of editors have edited more than 100 times. The former is self-evident as a problem because it means we need to do so much more to encourage new editors. The latter is worrying because it means we also need to do much more to encourage editor retention as well as editor motivation.

Malayalam and Tamil have the healthiest position on this table – across all three parameters and looking at progress month-on-month. This is most probably because of the strong efforts at community building in both communities. It is really important that these communities continue to build on their strong foundations.

I am particularly excited about two languages in this list. Both Marathi and Bengali editor counts have increased across all parameters and that is very encouraging. They are large languages with massive potential. I am also really hopeful that the Marathi media coverage around last month’s WikiConference is going to support the community as they go about encouraging and supporting new and existing editors.

Overall, though, it must be said that the total number of new editors coming to new Indic wikipedias is low. So focus need to be on bringing new editors to wiki and retaining existing users.

Quality of Projects

(more…)

We just received the comScore statistics for September 2011. The overall global picture presents a really positive view for Wikimedia’s sites. We grew to 454 million unique visitors and our year-on-year growth rate of 14.2% was faster than the average growth of global Internet users of 9.7%. Good news!

What I found most noteworthy is that our growth is being driven by very strong increases in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East & Africa regions. This is only partially driven by the fact that these areas are where the Internet is growing. In fact, our growth there is much stronger than that of the overall Internet. This speaks well of the incredible value of our projects around the world.

When we look a bit closer, we see that we are still playing catch-up in Asia-Pacific and in the Middle East & Africa. Our share of unique Internet users in those geographies is lower than in the rest of the world. In China, we are far behind as a result of the limitations placed on our projects, which gave alternative projects an opportunity to develop their sites. But the rapid growth of our projects in China is a sign that we are alive and kicking there, despite the challenges.

This provides lots of scope for growth, but will also challenge us as we’ll need to deepen the knowledge available in the major languages and topics of interest for these regions. The graph below shows our current article counts for languages spoken by more than 200M, ordered by number of speakers (English at 3.7 million articles for 1.3 billion speakers is excluded to manage the y-axis).  Article count is not an ideal measure, as it doesn’t speak to quality. However, the story the picture tells is that we are still closer to the beginning than to the end of our quest to freely share the sum of all knowledge with every single human being.

Barry Newstead, Chief Global Development Officer