Erik Zachte has released new statistics on where visitors to Wikipedia come from, based on analyzing sampled server logs for IP addresses, which are then translated into geographic information (IP address ranges are assigned by area or country, making it possible to tell what country someone originates from when they visit a website; although as Zachte explains this technique is not foolproof. Known bots were also excluded from these samples).
The report finds that the country accounting for the most Wikimedia traffic is the United States. Of the total accessing of Wikimedia projects, 31% come from the United States; the country with the next most amount of traffic to the projects is Japan, with 8%. Following these countries are Germany with 7.9% and the United Kingdom with 5.9% of total traffic.
In contrast, at the bottom of the list are countries including Guinea-Bissau, Comoros and Tuvalu, which all account for less than 10K in page traffic per month (compared with 3395M for the United States). Many African nations rank near the bottom in terms of the total traffic to the Wikipedia projects, including Eritrea, Guinea, Lesotho, Liberia, Equatorial Guinea, Somalia, Burundi and Chad, all of which have under 50K in page view traffic per month, or under 0.0004% of the total. For all of these countries, this is calculated as being 0 page views per person per month (compared with the United States' 11 pageviews per person per month, or the United Kingdom's 10 pageviews per person per month). However, Zachte cautions that "do not mistake the page views presented in the reports for visits or even unique visitors. Those are entirely different metrics that can not be deduced from the sampled log."
The statistics are further broken out by which projects are visited by country. For instance, in the United States the English Wikipedia gets 89% of the traffic, while the Japanese Wikipedia gets 1.6% of the traffic and the Spanish Wikipedia 1.1%. In India the English Wikipedia gets 93.4% of the total traffic. In fact, the English Wikipedia ranks in the top three projects visited for every single country on the list. In many countries, the Wikipedia in the native language of the country is visited far less often than the English-language or other large Wikipedias.
Two Wikimedians offered followup analysis of the statistics after they were posted. Nikola Smolenski posted Wikipedia Page Views Per Country with Internet users, calculating the page views per person in terms of the number of people with Internet access instead of by total population (these numbers put the Netherlands Antilles and the Vatican at the top of the list, followed by Gibraltar and Luxembourg). Zachte later updated the statistics to include these values. And Andre Engels, in a post to Foundation-l, analyzed the percentage of traffic going to the English Wikipedia versus the local language Wikipedia in non-English speaking countries, and calculated the change in this percentage over time. He found that "the Q3-Q4 comparison for most countries shows a shift from English to the 'vernacular'" and wonders if this trend would hold true over time. Zachte also posted answers to questions that were asked about the statistics on Foundation-l.
Wikipedia Day 2010 was January 15, marking the ninth anniversary of Wikipedia's founding. A celebratory event is planned in New York City, with a "Wikipedia Day NYC" event scheduled for Sunday, January 24. The event, which will be held at New York University and is cosponsored by Free Culture NYU, will feature pizza, cake and a series of talks about Wikipedia, along with open space.
Other celebrations included a Wikipedia Day event in Bangalore on January 16, which featured a panel discussion and an update on Wikipedia initiatives in India.
Finally, the creation of the 100,000th article in the Hebrew Wikipedia was celebrated on the Wikipedia Day. According to Itzik Edri, spokesman for Wikimedia Israel, the chapter hosted an event at Tel Aviv University on Wikipedia with around 100 attendees. They also had a good deal of press about the 100,000th article, with 30 interviews and media stories. The chapter also printed postcards promoting Commons and Wikipedia, printed t-shirts celebrating the 100,000 articles, and ran article and content improvement contests for several months.
After a major earthquake struck Haiti on January 13, the article 2010 Haiti earthquake is now B-class, after receiving close to 4,000 edits in the past week. According to an analysis by user:Moni3, who also wrote up their advice for contributing to an article about a recent disaster, the crisis also led to the following articles being created: Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone, Casualties of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Humanitarian response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Zilda Arns, Georges Anglade, Jimmy O. Barikad, Raymond Joseph, National Palace (Haiti), Christopher Hotel, Hôtel Montana, Septentrional-Orient fault zone, 1907 Kingston earthquake, International Charter on Space and Major Disasters, and Timeline of rescue efforts after the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
Analysis of Wikipedia's coverage in outside media was complimentary. A Huffington Post entry on the day of the earthquake called Wikipedia's coverage "the most comprehensive article on the tragedy" as of that evening; the article quotes Durova and Jimmy Wales. And on January 15, an article in Infoworld about journalism's future quotes a researcher at Google, Krishna Bharat, as saying "the industry could learn a lot from Wikipedia" regarding Wikipedia's coverage of the earthquake.
According to stats.grok.se, the English Wikipedia article has been viewed 1,070,376 times so far this month. There is also a version of the article in 48 other languages so far, including Haitian Creole, the language of Haiti.
Wikinews also published several stories about the disaster, including a photoessay. There is a Commons category for files relating to the quake.
Following inconclusive discussion at Talk:Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and WT:Naming conventions (royalty and nobility) concerning the right way to name articles about monarchs, a possible community-wide poll on the matter is currently in preparation. Current discussion concerns what questions should be asked, what answers should be available, and how the poll should be presented.
Audi's new A8 D4 luxury car will have built-in access to Wikipedia, CNET reported this week. The car will be able to download and display live content from Wikipedia as the driver encounters points of interest.
The A8's Multi Media Interface can also display maps directly from 3D mapping service Google Earth. The car connects to the internet by either tethering the drivers' mobile phone connection, or inserting a SIM card into the internal GPRS/EDGE modem.
On his personal blog, Brendan Wolfe (English Wikipedia user Margo&Gladys), who has previously contributed to the San Francisco Chronicle and now edits Encyclopedia Virginia, an online encyclopedia with entries about the American state of Virginia, explains how he improved the article on Bix Beiderbecke to Good Article status.
India's The Hindu reports on the Tamil Wikipedia, and how editors hope that increasing the amount of freely available content will increase the growth of vernacular content online. In the article, Balasundararaman, an editor on the Tamil Wikipedia, says that the greatest barriers to the growth of the Tamil Wikipedia are a lack of online references, which he hopes developments in search engines will cause to improve.
Since this is the first WikiProject Report in six months, we thought we'd look back at some of the 41 WikiProjects that have been previously featured in the Signpost from October 8, 2007 to June 15, 2009. Where are they now?
When WikiProject Biography was featured in the first WikiProject Report on October 8, 2007, the project's 400 members were celebrating its fifth birthday. Over two years later, WikiProject Biography is still active and boasts more than 600 members including 32 admin members. With over 700 pieces of featured content and more than 1,700 good articles, WikiProject Biography is one of Wikipedia's great success stories.
WikiProject Military history, the second project featured in the Signpost, would be covered twice by the Report on October 11, 2007 and July 28, 2008. It continues to be a very active project with an impressive 417 featured articles, 62 featured lists, 9 featured topics, 179 featured pictures, 9 featured sounds, 10 featured portals, and 218 A-Class articles. The project is nearing its goal of 500 featured articles and has organized two special long-term projects called Operation Great War Centennial and Operation Majestic Titan. The first aims to improve articles related to World War I, while the second has the goal of raising all battleship and battlecruiser articles to FA.
The only other project to be featured twice is WikiProject LGBT studies which was reported upon on December 3, 2007 and May 25, 2009. To keep their 58 featured articles and lists free of vandalism, the project's members regularly patrol the LGBT watchlist. The number of articles within the scope of the project continues to grow rapidly, leaving the project with a backlog of unassessed articles with which the project members would greatly appreciate some help.
Of the most recently featured projects, WikiProject Oregon tends to be the most active. When the project was featured on June 15, 2009, project members boasted about their double collaboration system providing two articles each week for collaborative improvement. Those collaborations continue to this day, although they are now offered at a fortnightly rate. To get a feel for how busy the project is, take a look at the project's very active talk page where new discussions are started daily.
Not all projects have fared so well. Motto of the Day was once a thriving WikiProject but has fallen on hard times. The project's talk page reveals that members were already having problems maintaining a constant supply of mottos several months before the Report interviewed six active contributors on January 31, 2009. Shortly after celebrating the project's fourth anniversary in April 2009, activity slowed down. In November 2009, one contributor commented that the project had been "teetering on running dry with only short bursts" of activity in the previous months. The last post on the project's motto nomination page was on November 28, 2009.
The Report's interview with folks at WikiProject Color hinted at a promising future for the small project, but it hasn't grown much since the project was featured on April 13, 2009. While it remains active, the project still has yet to bring an article up to featured status and the project's three good articles were battered by reassessments, leaving only the color green with good article status.
There have also been some consolidations as WikiProjects changed focus or took on new responsibilities. WikiProject Food and Drink swallowed the inactive WikiProject Ice Cream while WikiProject Final Fantasy was absorbed by WikiProject Square Enix.
Several of the earliest WikiProjects featured in the Signpost focused on utilitarian topics like WikiProject Outline of Knowledge (formerly WikiProject Lists of basic topics), WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles, and WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors (formerly the League of Copy Editors).
The most active projects previously covered by the Report tend to be related to sports and entertainment, including WikiProjects on football (soccer), ice hockey, professional wrestling, films, music, opera, video games, and the Simpsons. WikiProject Family Guy has been very active, resulting in 35 good articles, a featured article (North by North Quahog), and a featured list (List of Family Guy cast members). The project continues to produce a constant stream of good article nominees, mostly covering individual episodes of the television series.
In one of the Report's eeriest coincidences, WikiProject Michael Jackson was featured one month before the pop star's death.
Over the years, WikiProject Report has tried to be somewhat comprehensive in its coverage. All three of the largest monotheistic religions have been featured: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Scientific topics featured in the Report have included WikiProjects on plants, agriculture, molecular and cellular biology, chemistry, pharmacology, tropical cyclones, and the solar system. Geographic topics have ranged from the large countries covered by WikiProject China and WikiProject India to smaller communities like WikiProject Greater Manchester.
Next week, WikiProject Report will focus on a storied project started in 2002. Until then, feel free to take a look at previous reports for the projects mentioned above and many more in the WikiProject Reports archive.
Reader comments
One editor was granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Rlendog (nom).
Eight articles were promoted to featured status this week: Third Test, 1948 Ashes series (nom), Cyclura nubila (nom), William Garrow (nom), International Space Station (nom), Carabane (nom), Is This It (nom), Cock Lane ghost (nom) and Sacrifice (video game) (nom).
Nine lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of Inner Hebrides (nom), Madonna videography (nom), List of international cricket centuries by Marcus Trescothick (nom), List of Oklahoma Sooners in the NBA and WNBA Drafts (nom), Order of battle at the Battle of the Nile (nom), List of civil parishes in Somerset (nom), Charlotte Bobcats all-time roster (nom), Hartford Dark Blues all-time roster (nom) and List of Seattle Sounders FC players (nom).
No topics were promoted to featured status this week.
No portals were promoted to featured status this week.
The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page as Today's featured article this week: Splendid Fairywren, Ganymede, The Dark Side of the Moon, Emery Molyneux, Solomon P. Sharp, Ketogenic diet and Meerkat Manor: The Story Begins.
Three articles were delisted this week: Soviet invasion of Poland (nom), Military brat (U.S. subculture) (nom) and Anabolic steroid (nom).
No lists were delisted this week.
One topic was delisted this week: X-Men films (nom).
No portals were delisted this week.
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page as picture of the day this week: Illustration of relative astronomical orders of magnitude, Light-mantled Albatross, 1890s photochrom of the quay at Waterford, Ireland, Peter Levy, Castle Geyser, Snipe fly and Onna yu, a late-eighteenth century Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print.
Two featured sounds were promoted this week:
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| The second piece from Fernando Sor's Twelve Minuets, Opus 11, early 19th century | (nom) |
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| The Ride of the Valkyries from Richard Wagner's Die Walküre | (nom) |
No featured pictures were demoted this week.
Thirteen pictures were promoted to featured status this week.
The Arbitration Committee opened one case over the past two weeks and closed none, leaving two open.
The technology report has been absent from the Signpost for a few weeks; this is a short summary of the important changes in the weeks of January 4 through January 18. (Contributors to future editions are welcome at the Newsroom).
The past two weeks saw quite a few changes in the configuration of Wikipedia, as repeated attempts were made to launch several new features that have been in testing.
On January 4, a first attempt was made to launch Global Usage extension. This much requested software extension shows editors all the uses of a file hosted on Wikimedia Commons throughout the various Wikimedia projects. It brings the service of the CheckUsage tool hosted on the toolserver to the core of the MediaWiki software. After some initial kinks, the software was fully operational by January 12.
A new server, bits.wikimedia.org, was launched January 10, to host shared static content of all the Wikimedia installations. This content consists mostly of the interface styling and scripts that all versions of Wikipedia and its sister projects use. The server is specifically optimized to host and deliver this content efficiently to a lot of people. The setup required some experimentation however and in the past two weeks this led several times to people finding that their interface had lost all its styling. These issues were resolved on January 15.
Due to very large animated GIF images crashing the server that makes the thumbnails, the scaling of all GIF images had been disabled for the past months. This was not optimal of course, and new code to detect animated GIF images and decide whether they were potentially too large, was added to the software some time ago. On January 4, these changes were deployed. For reasons not yet understood, all thumbnails of all animated GIFs became stills. This was not the intention, and on January 13 the changes were undone, awaiting analysis of the problem. See also bugzilla:22041.
