Very interesting and much-needee research. Thanks for doing this. I'd love
to see the results and even the process.
Some things to consider:
1. How long is the tradition of having published encyclopedias in that
culture?
2. Alphabet: Using a common alphabet may make it somewhat easier to
translate information between languages that use it, especially for things
like towns and biographies. The Korean alphabet is used only by one
language, but the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets are used by many (with
variations).
3. How long is the tradition of *actually* having public education for
everybody: rich and poor, cities and villages? By "actually" I mean "not
just by law, but in practice".
4. How long is the tradition of mostly-universal literacy? ("Literacy" is
one of the most fuzzily defined concepts. Here I refer to something like
"being able to read a newspaper and to write a one-page letter in one's own
native language".)
5. How long is the tradition of having public libraries in most towns and
villages?
6. How common is it to know other languages?
7. How isolated or open is the society that speaks this language in terms
of access to media from other countries, translation of literature from
other languages, travel to other countries?
8. How widespread are basic computer literacy skills: using a web browser;
sending an email; copying, down/uploading, and deleting files.
9. How long is the tradition of having language resources, such as
dictionaries, spelling standards, thesauri, style guides?
10. Is the language used completely in public education for teaching,
textbooks, and homework? Or is the education mostly done in a foreign
language? (This, roughly, is the situation in the Philippines and in many
African countries.)
11. When did the language become an official language of a country? (If at
all.)
12. Are there political, cultural, or government-suported movements for
language development or preservation?
13. When did it become universally possible to fully write this language on
a computer, with complete keyboards and fonts support? E.g., English has
been easy to use on any computer for as long as there are computers;
Polish, German, Russian and many other languages have been supported for a
long time, but still struggled with encodings and diacritics in the 1990s;
India and Burma are still struggling; I'm not sure about Korea.
These are the immediate things I can think about. There are probably many
more criteria that could be considered.
The economics around a country are probably very important (poverty, access
to infrastructure, healthcare, etc.), and you mentioned in your first email
that you accounted for it, although I don't know in how much detail, so I
trust you on that :)
בתאריך 24 ביולי 2018 12:04, "Piotr Konieczny" <pio...@post.pl> כתב:
Dear all,
I am working on a paper on why/whether people contribute (or not) to
collective intelligence differently projects in different countries. The
paper was inspired, partially, by several discussions I had with various
people on why different language Wikipedia's have different sizes,
besides (doh) the popularity of the language (and yes, English is
biggest because it is international; and yes, I am aware a few
Wikipedias are outliers because of bots creating machine translations or
auto-populating villages or such). But for example, Poland and South
Korea have roughly similar population/speakers and development status,
yet Polish Wikipedia is over 3x the size of the SK one and no bot can
account for that. So, there's more to that. I am already feeding dozens
of parameters to a spreadsheet for some modelling, but I a) wonder what
I might have missed - before a reviewer asks 'why didn't you check for
xyz' and b) would like to have a few nice sentences about how things
that people expect to matter do not (or vice versa). Hence, my question
to you all, in the form of this open question mini survey:
Why do you think different language Wikipedia's have different sizes,
outside of the popularity of a given language?
For reference, list of Wikipedias by size and language:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
TIA!
--
Piotr Konieczny, PhD
http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
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