Proposal talk:Language demand statistics

From Strategic Planning

Impact?

Some proposals will have massive impact on end-users, including non-editors. Some will have minimal impact. What will be the impact of this proposal on our end-users? -- Philippe

Statistics for multilingual priorities

I firmly believe there are fairly reliable approaches to dealing with this problem. Let's take the case of Wikipedia where there are now over 3 million articles in English but far fewer in the other languages. You could start by making a statistical analysis of those pages which:

  • have high quality ratings, preferably coupled with medium to high priority ratings in the criteria found on talk pages;
  • or which have a high number of page accesses.

Under these conditions, it would be possible, for example, to alert editors of other languages to pay special attention to these English language pages and suggest, where their language ability permits, that they should use computerised pre-translation tools to assist in preparing versions in their own language.

On the same basis, stub pages in other languages could often been enhanced on the basis of more thoroughly researched English pages with their usually more complete references.

Finally, in the opposite direction, interesting articles in other language versions could be prioritised for inclusion in the English Wikipedia.-