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User:Piotrus/Wikipedia interwiki and specialized knowledge test

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One of the interesting questions about Wikipedia is 'how much more information there is for Wikipedia to assimilate'?

Part of that answer, if we look at English Wikipedia, is the number of articles from non-English wikipedias that need to be translated. I was somewhat suprized that we have no such statistics - at least I was unable to find information on how many articles on a given Wiki (for example, Polish wiki) have interlinks to a specific (English) Wiki?

I checked pages of User:YurikBot and on Wikipedia:Interwikimedia link, Wikipedia:Interlanguage links, Wikipedia:Interwikimedia link (shouldn't those two be merged?) and Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination, but they don't seem to have the ansewer (or I can't find it :>)

So I decided to run a little test: take a random sample of 100 pages from Polish Wikipedia (4th largest Wikipedia with over 250,000 articles) and see how many have interwiki links to en wiki. The sample was taken by clicking the 'random page' button and noting down if article has an interwiki or not.

Results: out of 100 pages randomly selected on Polish Wikipedia, 72 had no interwiki links to en Wikipedia.

Notes:

  1. The results may be slightly undercounted, as it is possible some pages have an unlinked equivalent on en-wiki. If I were to check, I expect that around 10 pages should have equivalents on en wiki.
  2. I did count disambig pages
  3. Interestingly quite a few of pages that have no interwiki to English wiki have interwiki to wikis in another language. I did not keep track of that, just noted the general trend.
  4. Many of the missing pages were towns, villages, administrative districts. Interestingly, many of those were foreign (French, Italian, etc.) and belonged in the category 'has interwikis to non-English wiki but not to English wiki').

Conclusion: While generalizing from Polish Wiki to other wikis is not recommended and we should do similar tests for other wikis, it appears that between 60-70% of articles on Polish wiki have not yet been translated to en wiki. According to Wikipedia article, Wikipedia had more than 4,600,000 articles in many languages, including more than 1,200,000 in the English-language version. Therefore it is possible that just by translating articles from non-English wikipedias into English Wikipedias we would increase the size of English Wikipedia by ~2,000,000 articles.

To do:

  • see if the same number holds true for other Wikipedias. Analysis of German - second largest, and French - third largest, would be quite useful. The other 7 to get 'top ten' would further increase statistical significance of these analysis accross the Wikipedia's projects.
  • get data on how much

See also

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