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Wikipedia's traffic drop: more on languages and freshness (en.wikipedia.org)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by antonim@lemmy.world to c/wikipedia@lemmy.world

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Since 2016–2019, aggregate monthly pageviews of Wikipedia's "Vital Articles" are down −26% across eight major languages I sampled (en, es, fr, de, it, pt, ja, ar). The Vital Articles are an imperfect set, but they cover a much broader set of topics than my last sample set, and are widely replicated across wikis. (All of these wikis have at least 80% of the articles, making it more apples-to-apples.)

The decline isn't even across topics. Mathematics, physical sciences, and technology are down 43% to 85%; biographical articles and geography are down less than 10% in half the languages I looked at. The per-topic ordering (which have declined the most or the least) is nearly identical in every one of the eight languages.

Freshness of article content matters, but not as strongly as topic.

– Luis Villa

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[–] antonim@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

Yeah, the different versions don't have to be synchronised, and the standards for sources differ (outside of the big European languages, the standards are much lower and there's much more bullshit out there), and simply you can have one editor doing things the way they prefer on one wiki, an another editor with their preferences on the other one. Some of that can be a result of different local cultures or academic traditions (different terminology, different systems of classification, etc.).

Btw there's currently a project that's supposed to solve this, "Abstract Wikipedia", the idea being that you enter information that's language-independent and that can be converted into any individual language.

(It's really bad and won't work out.)