The Japanese Wikipedia is the second wikipedia in traffic ....

Given that the Japanese Wikipedia is the second wikipedia in traffic, given that we already agreed that article numbers is not really relevant, I am surprised to see these statistics as the basis of this question. Also the selection seems to be about number of native speakers not about the number of speakers and as such jv is less relevant then id.

Consequently the question framed like this has its own internal problems and is therefore hardly answerable. Thanks,

Sorry but I am missing the connection: aren't we asking about the desired ratio of contributors to readers? It seems like that's something we can discuss independently of article counts or whatever.

A ratio is a comparison to something else.. What ratio are we discussing. If this is not relevant, then fine.. It only means that the way the question was put is not appropriate. I think it is largely irrelevant, the question could have been "how do we grow our editor community in relation to the number of people visiting our wikis" this question at least acknowledges that only readers become editors ... the current question assumes that everyone knows about our projects.

I think you're right, Gerard. As I stated above, I think that our conclusion from the slide might be that asking about ratios is the wrong question.

It's possible that the ratio of readers to contributors is relatively fixed. I know that in shareware, the ratio of downloads to sales seems to hover around 1 or 2%, no matter how much marketing you put behind it.

That said, I still think that we can convert more readers into contributors if we expand what we mean by "contributor". Most people think the only way they can contribute is by writing articles. They don't realize that we need people for peer review, people to flag news articles about certain industries and fields of study, and people who can just help copy-edit. There may be an entire class of readers who realize there were tons of ways they could help.

Really excellent point. One of the things we should potentially be doing is tracking other types of volunteers. Could be a recommendation for Task force/Community Health.

We need people to take pictures in every country. We need these pictures to feature in articles in every Wikipedia and maybe even as featured pictures. We need people to restore images so that they become awesome illustrations.

It is not only about words..