Indian Language Wikipedias - Statistics - 2010 January

Here is a detailed statistical analysis of Indian language Wikipedias for the month of 2010 January .

The PDF of this analysis is available at http://shijualexonline.googlepages.com/2010_01_january_en.pdf. Please use the PDF for referring to the tables as the size of the tables in blog post is quite lengthy.

The data for this report is taken from the statistical analysis of all the WikiMedia wikis prepared and maintained by Erik Zachte (Website: http://infodisiac.com/). Special thanks to Erik for all the support extended by him while I was compiling this report. The data is collected on the last day of every month. That is, the data for the month of 2010 January is collected at 2010 January 31 23:59 PM GMT.

The statistical analysis of the following Indian language Wikipedias is included in this blog post.

• Assamese (http://as.wikipedia.org)

• Bengali (http://bn.wikipedia.org)

• Bhojpuri (http://bh.wikipedia.org)

• Bishnupriya Manipuri (http://bpy.wikipedia.org)

• Gujarathi (http://gu.wikipedia.org)

• Hindi (http://hi.wikipedia.org)

• Kannada (http://kn.wikipedia.org)

• Kashmiri (http://ks.wikipedia.org)

• Malayalam (http://ml.wikipedia.org)

• Marathi (http://mr.wikipedia.org)

• Odia (Oriya) (http://or.wikipedia.org)

• Pali (http://pi.wikipedia.org)

• Punjabi (http://pa.wikipedia.org)

• Sanskrit (http://sa.wikipedia.org)

• Sindhi (http://sd.wikipedia.org)

• Tamil (http://ta.wikipedia.org)

• Telugu (http://te.wikipedia.org)

• Urdu (http://ur.wikipedia.org)

I have also included the statistical analysis of some other language wikipedias from Indian subcontinent even though these languages are not spoken in India. I am very much interested in the wiki activity of these languages.

• Burmese (http://my.wikipedia.org)

• Nepal Bhasha/Newari (http://new.wikipedia.org)

• Nepali (http://ne.wikipedia.org)

• Sinhala (http://si.wikipedia.org)

I know that there is no meaning in comparing an inactive wiki with less number articles like Assamese or Oriya, to highly active wikipedias like Hindi or Telugu. But for this month, let me treat all of them together. Next month onwards I would like to treat them as two separate entities.

I hope this initiative will improve the interaction between different Indian Language Wikipedias/wikipedians. We (Malayalam Wikipedians - http://ml.wikipedia.org) have been maintaining a similar comparison study of the major Indian Language wikipedias for the past two years. This analysis has helped us to understand the status of Malayalam Wikipedia as compared to other Indian Language Wikipedias. I hope this analysis will also help other Indian language wikipedias.

Please feel free to add your suggestions/analysis as comment to this post. I have divided this report into two different sections.

1. Statistical analysis of Wikipedias

2. Localization status of Mediawiki software

Following are the different topics covered under each section.

Wikipedia Statistics

Article statistics

• Number of Articles

• Number of Edits

• Break up of edits (2009 February – 2010 January)

• Edits per article

• Number of new articles/day

• Average size of an article (bytes)

• Database size (in Mega Bytes)

• Percentage of articles with size greater than 500 bytes

• Percentage of articles with size greater than 2000 bytes (2 kilobytes)

User Statistics

• Number of active wikipedians

• Page views per month (All figures in Lakhs/month)

MediaWiki Statistics

Localization statistics

• Media Wiki Localization status (percentage)

Number of Articles

Wikipedia Language	Number of Articles
	2009 November	2009 December	2010 January
Assamese	261	261	263
Bengali	20,754	20,918	21,016
Bhojpuri	2,480	2,481	2,481
Bishnupriya Manipuri	23,424	24,733	24,738
Gujarathi	11,255	11,904	12,579
Hindi	52,144	52,645	53,216
Kannada	7,596	7,741	7,846
Kashmiri			375
Malayalam	11,459	11,635	11,871
Marathi	25,737	26,034	26,544
Odia (Oriya)	553	553	553
Pali			2,316
Punjabi	1,490	1,492	1,505
Sanskrit	3,883	3,887	3,914
Sindhi			349
Tamil	20,095	20,472	20,959
Telugu	44,098	44,238	44,333
Urdu			12,547
Burmese			2,938
Nepal Bhasha/Newari			61,487
Nepali			3,079
Sinhala			2,153

Hindi Wikipedia continues to have the highest number of articles among all the Indian language Wikipedias. Telugu Wikipedia is in the second place. The number of articles in Gujarathi Wikipedia is almost doubled during the past 6 months. Among the active Wikipedias, Kannada and Malayalam are growing very slowly (growth in terms of article number) compared to other active Indian language wikipedias.

When you analyze the different topics in this blog post, you will understand that some of the big wikipedias do not have enough number of edits corresponding to the number of articles. Also the number of stub articles in some big wikis are very high.

Let us hope the stub articles will get more content as more active contributors arrive.

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Number of Edits

Wikipedia Language	Number of Edits
	2009 November	2009 December	2010 January
Assamese	8,926	9,134	9,290
Bengali	5,51,486		5,86,472
Bhojpuri	52,553	53,203	54,099
Bishnupriya Manipuri	4,18,566	4,29,198	4,36,153
Gujarathi	63,578	67,769	72,492
Hindi	5,51,162	5,67,029	5,81,447
Kannada	1,22,964	1,26,504	1,29,848
Kashmiri			13,075
Malayalam	5,33,391	5,51,307	5,69,056
Marathi	4,45,205	4,58,769	4,74,113
Odia (Oriya)	19,805	20,052	20,321
Pali			48,865
Punjabi	16,980	17,426	18,176
Sanskrit	67,151	68,557	70,132
Sindhi
Tamil	4,59,441	4,71,678	4,83,481
Telugu	4,69,481	4,76,825	4,83,390
Urdu			2,70,868
Burmese			30,503
Nepal Bhasha/ Newari			458,066
Nepali			40,363
Sinhala			74,493

More number of edits from multiple contributors will enhance the quality of articles in a Wikipedia.

Hindi, Bengali, and Malayalam Wikipedias have the highest number of edits in the Wikipedia. But most of the big wikis do not have the number of edits corresponding to the number of articles.

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Break up of edits (2009 February – 2010 January)

Wikipedia Language	Bot edits	User Edits (Registered and Anonymous users)
Assamese	55	45
Bengali	68	32
Bhojpuri	92	8
Bishnupriya Manipuri	96	4
Gujarathi	37	63
Hindi	49	51
Kannada	53	47
Kashmiri	83	17
Malayalam	37	63
Marathi	59	41
Odia (Oriya)	92	8
Pali	94	6
Punjabi	55	45
Sanskrit	82	18
Sindhi	29	71
Tamil	51	49
Telugu	51	49
Urdu	53	47
Burmese	41	59
Nepal Bhasha/ Newari	91	9
Nepali	52	48
Sinhala	12	88

You can use wiki bots to automate a set of tasks that are repetitive and boring. For example, adding inter wiki links, fixing double redirects, and so on. But for some wikipedias majority of the contributions are from the bots.

From the above table, you can conclude that for some of the big wikipedias, the wiki activity is not due to human editors. Edits by bots are more than 80% in some cases. Some wikis are even using the wiki bots to create one-liner articles just for the sake of increasing the article count. This approach needs to be changed.

We need to learn how to use the bots effectively to increase the quality of wiki articles, rather than creating one liner articles. Using bots to create the title-only articles will effectively block many future wikipedians from wiki editing. Most of the people outside wikipedia will start wikipedia edit by creating an article. By using bots to create thousands of one-liner articles we are loosing many of the future wikipedians.

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Edits per article

Wikipedia language	2009 November	2009 December	2010 January
Assamese	19.3	20.0	20.2
Bengali	16.7	17.0	17.2
Bhojpuri	5.5	11.7	18.7
Bishnupriya Manipuri	9.3	9.1	9.3
Gujarathi	4.3	4.4	4.5
Hindi	7.0	7.2	7.3
Kannada	12.8	12.9	13.1
Kashmiri	28.3	28.8	29.3
Malayalam	26.6	27.1	27.4
Marathi	13.1	13.3	13.5
Odia (Oriya)	21.8	22.1	22.5
Pali	17.7	18.0	18.3
Punjabi	8.0	8.3	8.6
Sanskrit	14.7	15.0	15.2
Sindhi	23.5	23.8	24.1
Tamil	16.3	16.5	16.5
Telugu	8.0	8.0	8.1
Urdu	15.9	16.0	16.2
Burmese	6.3	6.4	6.6
Nepal Bhasha/Newari	3.0	2.9	2.9
Nepali	9.7	10.0	9.9
Sinhala	23.2	21.4	21.8

The number of edits in an article is an indicator of article quality and wiki activism. It shows how much attention that an article gets. More edits to an article by multiple contributors indicate that the quality and the neutrality of an article is better than an article with only a few edits by only one or two editors. (You can always debate this. But this is true in most of the cases.) Among the active big wikipedias Malayalam Wikipedia tops the list with an average of 29 edits for each of its articles.

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Number of new articles/day

Wikipedia Language	2010 January
Assamese	Not Available
Bengali	5
Bhojpuri	Not Available
Bishnupriya Manipuri	Not Available
Gujarathi	Not Available
Hindi	18
Kannada	Not Available
Kashmiri	Not Available
Malayalam	8
Marathi	17
Odia (Oriya)	Not Available
Pali	Not Available
Punjabi	Not Available
Sanskrit	Not Available
Sindhi	Not Available
Tamil	16
Telugu	3
Urdu	5
Burmese	3
Nepal Bhasha/ Newari	45
Nepali	Not Available
Sinhala	3

The above table shows the average number of articles created in a wiki daily.

Increasing the number of articles in a wikipedia is very important. Then only the wikipedia will get a large user base (readers). Hindi, Tamil, and Marathi Wikipedia tops this list. Hope all the Indian wikipedia communities will make sure these “new articles” will have sufficient content, so that wiki user does not need to navigate away to English Wikipedia or Google to get the information about a topic.

A large number of articles with good encyclopaedic content will attract more potential editors to the wikipedia. So please ensure that you are adding at least the basic facts and figures in all the newly created articles.

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Average size of an article (bytes)

Wikipedia language	2009 November	2009 December	2010 January
Assamese	2506	2506	1492
Bengali	1342	1383	1407
Bhojpuri	118	119	119
Bishnupriya Manipuri	1084	1086	1090
Gujarathi	1056	1098	1099
Hindi	1182	1235	1275
Kannada	1923	2526	2806
Kashmiri	424	422	420
Malayalam	2690	2725	2740
Marathi	768	777	800
Odia (Oriya)	236	236	236
Pali	141	141	141
Punjabi	741	740	759
Sanskrit	184	187	197
Sindhi	4092	4080	4070
Tamil	2118	2441	2574
Telugu	832	883	915
Urdu	1535	1554	1550
Burmese	2986	3037	3033
Nepal Bhasha/ Newari	707	805	882
Nepali	1256	1282	1259
Sinhala	5892	5430	5452

A wikipedia article will benefit a user when the articles have sufficient content. But many of the big Wikipedias have less content in most of its articles.

It is extremely happy to see the long articles in Sinhala wikipedia. Sinhala Wikipedia has more than 2000 articles now. Many of the Indian language Wikipedias should learn from Sinhala wikipedia the art of adding more content to the existing articles.

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Database size (in Mega Bytes)

Wikipedia language	2009 November	2009 December	2010 January
Assamese	1.5	1.5	1.5
Bengali	81	84	86
Bhojpuri	4.8	4.8	4.8
Bishnupriya Manipuri	65	65	65
Gujarathi	32	35	37
Hindi	165	174	181
Kannada	42	53	59
Kashmiri	0.77	0.77	0.78
Malayalam	88	90	93
Marathi	63	64	67
Odia (Oriya)	1.2	1.2	1.2
Pali	4.7	4.7	4.7
Punjabi	4	4	4.1
Sanskrit	6.6	6.6	6.8
Sindhi	2.8	2.8	2.9
Tamil	119	138	148
Telugu	97	103	107
Urdu	40	42	42
Burmese	24	26	26
Nepal Bhasha/Newari	107	128	144
Nepali	9.2	9.5	9.8
Sinhala	34	39	40

This is the total size of a wikipedia. No wonder Hindi Wikipedia tops the list, as it is also the biggest wiki with highest number of articles.

It is extremely happy to see that Tamil wikipedia with article number half of Hindi wikipedia is having the database size almost in the same range of Hindi Wikipedia. This shows that even though the number of articles in Tamil wikipedia is less as compared to Hindi or Telugu, it has more content in its articles.

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Percentage of articles with size greater than 500 bytes

Wikipedia language	2009 November	2009 December	2010 January
Assamese	41	41	41
Bengali	56	57	57
Bhojpuri	2	2	2
Bishnupriya Manipuri	85	86	86
Gujarathi	19	19	20
Hindi	42	43	43
Kannada	54	55	55
Kashmiri	12	12	12
Malayalam	84	84	84
Marathi	26	26	27
Odia (Oriya)	2	2	2
Pali	1	1	1
Punjabi	16	16	16
Sanskrit	4	5	5
Sindhi	61	60	60
Tamil	81	82	82
Telugu	22	22	22
Urdu	55	55	55
Burmese	67	67	67
Nepal Bhasha/Newari	60	62	63
Nepali	55	56	54
Sinhala	78	81	81

The above table shows the percentage of articles with size more than 500 bytes.

More than 80 percentage of the articles in Tamil, Bishnupriya Manipuri, and Malayalam wikipedias have article size crossing 500 bytes. For some big wikipedias, more than 50 % of its articles have size less than 500 bytes; which reveals that many of those articles are not much help to the reader. The reader still need to depend on English Wikipedia or Google to acquire the required information. More effort is required from the respective wiki communities to make the Wikipedia useful to the respective language community.

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Percentage of articles with size greater than 2000 bytes (2 kilobytes)

Wikipedia language	2009 November	2009 December	2010 January
Assamese	22	22	22
Bengali	14	14	15
Bhojpuri	1	1	1
Bishnupriya Manipuri	1	1	1
Gujarathi	5	5	5
Hindi	9	10	10
Kannada	15	16	17
Kashmiri	5	5	5
Malayalam	34	35	35
Marathi	6	7	7
Odia (Oriya)	1	1	1
Pali	0	0	0
Punjabi	8	8	8
Sanskrit	1	1	1
Sindhi	33	33	33
Tamil	24	25	25
Telugu	8	8	8
Urdu	17	17	17
Burmese	38	39	39
Nepal Bhasha/Newari	2	7	11
Nepali	10	10	10
Sinhala	53	53	53

The above table shows the percentage of articles with size more than 2000 bytes. Among active Wikipedias Malayalam, and Tamil tops the list. You can make your own analysis by comparing this table with the previous table.

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Number of active wikipedians

Wikipedia language	2009 November	2009 December	2010 January
Assamese	1	1	1
Bengali	25	35	32
Bhojpuri	1	1	1
Bishnupriya Manipuri	6	6	4
Gujarathi	7	9	8
Hindi	50	62	51
Kannada	24	22	22
Kashmiri	0	0	1
Malayalam	56	50	65
Marathi	22	25	36
Odia (Oriya)	0	0	0
Pali	0	1	0
Punjabi	1	1	4
Sanskrit	4	5	6
Sindhi	1	0	2
Tamil	45	55	53
Telugu	38	34	26
Urdu	24	20	20
Burmese	1	1	4
Nepal Bhasha/Newari	3	3	3
Nepali	8	5	5
Sinhala	45	37	7

The number of active wikipedians is the strength of a wikipedia. They define the quality of a wikipedia. For that, the Wikipedia should have number of active Wikipedians corresponding to its total number of articles. Then only edits will happen in more number of articles. Hindi, Tamil, and Malayalam tops the list with most number of active wikipedians.

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Page views per month (All figures in Lakh page views/month)

Wikipedia language	2009 November	2009 December	2010 January
Assamese	0.87	0.93	0.86
Bengali	22	28	24
Bhojpuri	0.09	0.09	0.11
Bishnupriya Manipuri	13	15	14
Gujarathi	4.6	5.4	4.9
Hindi	41	49	41
Kannada	8.08	9.16	7.72
Kashmiri	0.52	0.57	0.51
Malayalam	27	28	26
Marathi	23	28	24
Odia (Oriya)	0.41	0.42	0.40
Pali	0.85	0.83	0.82
Punjabi	1.24	1.28	1.33
Sanskrit	2.00	2.11	2.17
Sindhi	0.57	0.61	0.54
Tamil	24	26	24
Telugu	37	41	33
Urdu	11	10	10
Burmese	1.58	1.60	1.77
Nepal Bhasha/Newari	13	14	15
Nepali	1.44	1.47	1.55
Sinhala	2.82	3.02	3.50

Number of page views represent how many times the readers/wiki editors have opened the wiki pages. This parameter is some what related to the number of articles in a Wiki. If there are more number of articles wiki visitors will also be more. Many of today's readers can be future wiki editors. This is one of the main reasons to increase the number of articles (of course with quality content).

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Media Wiki Localization status (percentage)

Language	Most often used messages	MediaWiki messages	Extensions used by Wikimedia	All extensions
Assamese	98.08	43.83	1.86	1.61
Bengali	100.00	82.36	46.09	22.25
Bhojpuri	0.21	0.08	0.00	0.00
Bishnupriya Manipuri	100.00	52.51	0.11	0.30
Gujarathi	100.00	40.79	5.91	6.59
Hindi	99.36	97.22	29.43	26.44
Kannada	100.00	59.63	3.55	3.21
Kashmiri
Malayalam	100.00	97.90	98.00	51.77
Marathi	98.72	75.88	26.19	37.13
Odia (Oriya)	4.48	1.39	0.25	0.30
Pali	0.21	0.08	0.00	0.00
Punjabi	56.08	30.26	0.42	0.42
Sanskrit	97.65	27.22	0.00	0.34
Sindhi	73.13	24.91	0.11	0.07
Tamil	92.32	74.71	1.02	1.77
Telugu	100.00	100.00	65.41	52.57
Urdu	71.64	38.77	1.75	1.12
Burmese	29.00	10.45	0.07	0.02
Nepal Bhasha/Newari	32.84	12.35	0.04	0.01
Nepali	96.59	68.77	0.98	0.90
Sinhala	100.00	100.00	28.59	20.06

GerardM a translate wiki administrator, has been passing the below message to most of the Indian language wikipedias. He has also send mails regarding this to wikimediaindia mailing list a couple of times.

We expect that with the implementation of Localisation update the usability of MediaWiki for your language will improve. We are now ready to look at other aspects of usability for your language as well. There are two questions we would like you to answer: Are there issues with the new functionality of the Usability Initiative Does MediaWiki support your language properly. The best way to answer the first question is to visit the translatewiki.net...

Localization of the Wiki software is very important when we are trying to reach to prospective Wikipedians in any language. A website with interface and all system messages in the local language has edge over a website with English only content among that particular language community. Here comes the role of Localization of MediaWiki software. We use translate wiki for coordinating the localization efforts of all the languages. Two administrators of translate wiki, Siebrand and GerardM are available in this list also.

Some of the Malayalam Wikipedians (including me) have understood the importance of localizing the Media wiki messages to Malayalam long back (more than 2 years ago). From the above table you can understand that Malayalam is in the forefront in localizing the mediaWiki and other related system messages. Now a days Malayalam Wikipedian Praveen Prakash is coordinating the localization efforts of Media Wiki messages for Malayalam.

I request the respective community to give top priority in localizing the Mediawiki messages to your language. When you do so you are localizing the interface and system messages to your respective language. Apart from helping the Wiki projects of your language you are also helping a native user to use Media wiki software with the native language support.

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