[Web4lib] Authority files and Wikipedia

[Lars Aronsson]

Jeremy Dunck wrote:

> I believe this will do:
> http://www.ddb.de/news/pressemitt_wikipedia.htm

Something strange happens with my Mozilla browser when I try this 
URL.  I get bounced back to the page where I was before.

> > The German branch is the 2nd biggest in Wikipedia, surpassed only
> > by the 680,000 articles of the English language Wikipedia.
> 
> I've always wondered why that is-- if it is a cultural, technological,
> or random thing.

While I'm one of the strongest supporters of Wikipedia, I think it 
could have grown much faster than it has, if some early management 
mistakes had been avoided. This applies both to English and the 
other language branches.  The random damage it has taken from the 
"stumbling in the dark" in the early years is smaller for some 
language branches where this has been compensated by a strong and 
well organized community.  The Germans were the first to organize 
a national chapter as a membership association (wikimedia.de), 
which was now the main organizers of this conference.  Already one 
year ago, the Wikipedia presence at the Wizards of OS conference 
in Berlin worked as a de-facto international Wikipedia meeting.

Add to this that broad Internet penetration came late to Germany.  
For example there wasn't much for the dotcom death to reap in 
1999/2000, and the backlash wasn't so hard as in California or 
Scandinavia.  The German Wikipedia was able to fill much of the 
Internet vacuum that existed in the country, and has attracted a 
lot of media attention.

Still, while the German language is spoken by 10 times more people 
than Swedish, the Germany Wikipedia only has 3 times more articles 
than the Swedish one.  In the first two years, the Esperanto 
Wikipedia was far larger than the French one.  Such comparisons 
suggest the German and French Wikipedia could be much larger if 
everything was done right.  And suppose that the Bibliothèque 
nationale de France would cooperate with the French Wikipedia 
(they do not, as far as I know) in the same way that DDB has 
opened up to the German Wikipedia.

The English Wikipedia, on the other hand, has an infinite amount 
of English speakers to draw from, not only in English speaking 
countries, but many wikipedians in countries like Germany or 
Sweden contribute only to the English Wikipedia, especially early 
technology adopters who are fluent in English.  At the same time, 
there was already a "rich web" in English with sites such as 
IMDb.com, Everything2, and DMOZ, with which the English Wikipedia 
has had to compete.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se