Hi, We usually measure a Wikipedia's growth in terms of page views, article counts, active contributors etc., I felt that while all these parameters can be good indicators, they somehow miss to reflect the exact value and growth of a Wikipedia.
For example, * One Wikipedia may have 50 active editors (doing more than 5 edits per month) and 10 very active editors (doing more than 100 edits per month) But there are Wikipedias which have very very active editors who do more than 1000 edits a month. One such Wikipedian can be equal to 200 active editors ! Also, it calculates mere edits in article namespace. But, we have people working in sandboxes and uploading full articles in one go. There are also all kind of quality improving work done in Wikipedia namespace and other projects. * One Wikipedia might have 1000 good quality articles while another may have 10,000 average quality articles. * According to http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN_India/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm , Malayalam Wikipedia has only 2.9 M pave views per month and stands 4th in Indic Wikipedias. But if you normalise for the target population of each Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia might have the highest reach. I felt that measuring the actual human hours spent in building a Wikipedia could be one useful indicator of growth. So, I asked the Tamil Wikipedia community how many hours they spent for Tamil Wikipedia in one ideal week in May 2012. The question was asked in June 2012 so everyone only gave an approximate estimate. This included the We had 69 active editors and 20 very active editors for the month. http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaTA.htm 14 people answered the question and they spent a total of 294 hours a week. You can find the hours each of them spent in the table at http://tawp.in/r/37sn What is very striking is that many have spent around or more than 30 hours a week which can be thought of as a full time job by itself. So, normalising the data, we can safely say that we spent at least 400+ hours a week. If Tamil Wikipedia is an enterprise, then this equals to at least 10 full time workers. If you can come up with the market price for such high qualified talent that includes Professors, Teachers, Engineers and students working on such a project, the value of work done in kind crosses few lakh Indian Rupees every month. If you consider the value of work done since the beginning, what is the value of our project in physical terms? !! These were some of my thoughts when I went through this data ! Long live Wikipedia :) Ravi P.S. This study could have been more scientific, inclusive and planned to have better accuracy. But the idea is to visualize our Wikipedia's growth in terms of human hours spent even if this going to be a very approximate study.
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