Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-04-01/Special report

Discuss this story

Note: For stats, charts, and graphs see: commons:Category:Wikimedia statistics.

countries such as the Balkan states that were assimilated into the Soviet Union for most of the 20th century - I'm sorry to disappoint you, but there is only one country that formerly belonged to USSR and is close enough to Balkan to be mixed up. That's Moldova. And in its article in en.wiki, Balkan is not even mentioned. Check your facts. --Oop (talk) 13:17, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for being so polite. I erred, of course, in mixing up Balkan and Baltic—call it a typo. Now corrected. Tony (talk) 13:24, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Is the 25% increase in the last year due to link prefetching? Regards, Sun Creator^(talk) 14:05, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think there might have been a minor issue with Hong Kong being listed as a non-English speaking country when considering that it was a British Territory until 1997 and that English is used in there. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 15:41, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

English is one of two official languages in Malta, and 88% of its citizens speak English. Does this qualify it as a "[m]ajority native English-speaking country" (per the first image)? Wrad (talk) 15:57, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I had in mind that 2% of Hong Kong people are native speakers of English. I suspect that few Maltese are native speakers. Tony (talk) 23:55, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, makes sense. Incidentally, I'm red/green colorblind, and I have trouble distinguishing between lines in some of the lower images. For future Signpost articles, could we use a different color scheme? Wrad (talk) 00:29, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

How are the monthly views exatly measured? Some very interesting results there. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 16:25, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the interesting investigation. One of the surprising points for me was that Comoros actually have the best viewing-ratio in favor of ar WP, yet in over three years of working there I haven't seen a single Comorian editor, I have thought because of that the french was the dominant language for Comoros. In general, it seems that the more developed and educated Arab countries tends to have lower or average views of ar WP, that sounds interesting. Another point worthes mentioning (inspired by "Chequers" comment below) is that, from my own experience, size and growth of a native language's WP is essential for page views. For example, some articles that was developed from few poor sections to FA level in ar WP (Example) had raised page views as much as 20 times in one year. Better content, Much more visitors --aad_Dira (talk) 08:10, 6 April 2013 (UTC).[reply]

Namibia is definitely not a Portuguese-speaking country. I assume the author got confused with the neighbouring country of Angola. Lourie Pieterse 22:57, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Lourie, you're right to question this. Languages of Namibia says "English, the official language, is spoken by less than 1% of people as their native language. Among the white population, 60% speak Afrikaans, 32% German, 7% English, and 1% Portuguese (current figures show that they are in fact 4–5% of the total population of the country nowadays, i.e. 100,000 people)" (my italics). Nevertheless, the WMF's stats show that the share of views from that country to the Portuguese WP has declined from nearly 10% in 2009 to less than 1% now (put "Namibia" into your finder once you've arrived on that big stats page). Can you shed any light on this? And Erik, I wonder whether it's possible to track down whether the sharp dip in Portuguese WP views throughout the world in 2010 is an artefact of collecting the stats? Tony (talk) 05:59, 7 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have a plausible solution to this apparent anomaly. Firstly, I have only quickly looked at the statistics page now, but it would have been nice to see how the total amount of views increased for the country. It is my believe that the amount of Portuguese views stayed relatively the same, but that the other languages increased. I say this because access to internet connectivity increased dramatically in the last few years. It might be possible that the Portuguese views are attributed to higher-class individuals from Angola that only visit Namibia, or even higher-class nationals. Having geolocation information would help with understanding this, as I believe most of this traffic will originate from Windhoek. Secondly, I know some people from Namibia, including a friend who owns an aviation business in the northern areas, but have never heard of Portuguese nationals. I honestly do not know, as I have not even researched my above theory, I only speak out of experience. It is just most plausible in my mind that higher-class Portuguese visitors and nationals are responsible for that traffic and that as more people got access to the internet, that ratio declined. With more statistics, it will be easier to make solid conclusions. :) Lourie Pieterse 18:58, 7 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Namibia as a country had 0.002% of pageviews in 2009/10 and a tenth of that would be 0.0002% of global page views. I not sure how many hundreds of millions of readers we had in that era - but I think it has risen sharply to the 500 million a month of today. So it wouldn't be impossible for one in half a million of our page views in that era to be from one Portuguese speaking person in Namibia if by chance we had an active editor who lived there.. Alternatively it could have been a border anomaly with a Namibian company using one Internet portal for all its offices including one in Angola. I've known companies that ran their IT so that everything ran through head office, and as a result the subsidiary offices would appear to be geolocating to the wrong country. Ϣere SpielChequers 19:45, 7 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Search engines?

I suspect that some of these transitions are down to search engines. Search engines will vary their results by geography of searcher if they don't have more to go on, and if they shift from defaulting a country to En Wiki to AR wiki then the result could be significant.

Size of native language wiki will also be an issue, for people who speak languages such as Maltese and Slovenian a very high proportion of subjects will not be covered in their native language.

Another thing that will vary over time is the taught foreign language in a country. In much of the former Soviet block anyone born before 1975 will have been educated in a society where Russian was at least the first foreign language one learned, but the younger generation will have probably been taught English. Perversely as the Internet becomes more common in such countries it will spread from the young who usually have some English to the old whose non-native language is Russian. Ϣere SpielChequers 08:10, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Search engine changes is a good guess. I wonder how the google Knowledge Graph (deployed 2012) influences stats, does it link to english WP articles if you search in another language without a WP article?

My first thought about these stats was: Wikistats artefact? I read discussions about excluding bot pageviews in stats (which is done with a broad brush so far?) and about the strange mobile view stats. There are many questions. BTW, i have to say that the speculation about a sudden german popular-culture-interest spike is a really silly explanation! --Atlasowa (talk) 19:47, 7 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

One problem with excluding bots is in identifying the bots. The easy way is to look at accounts with the bot flag currently set on, that has the not inconsiderable problem in exercises like this when you look at old edits that some very active bots have been retired and deflagged. Hence the importance of also looking at lists of formerly flagged bots. I think the German popular culture theory is that the DE wiki has become less focussed on that area and thereby not covered that part of the market so well, rather than a change of interests amongst German internet readers. However I don't speak German so can't check the theory. Ϣere SpielChequers 08:49, 8 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Atlas, I'm sure a lot of people are interested in why German-speakers appear to be visiting the German WP less and other WPs more. I'd be very pleased if you could provide some hypotheses here. Tony (talk) 13:10, 8 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comoros

Comoros had bugs in its stats, I think they were corrected : Wiki stats gives 80% French, 10% English et 2 % Arabic (http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2012-12/SquidReportPageViewsPerCountryBreakdownHuge.htm). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Loup Solitaire 81 (talk • contribs) 01:51, 31 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]