Wikipédia:Central de pesquisas/Quem lê qual Wikipédia

Fig. 1: Accessos mensais a en.WP por usuário de internet. Em vermelho paises onde o inglês é a principal linguagem, contra mais de 40 outras nações. Porcentagem de acessos gloabais a en.WP está entre parêntese.

Fig. 2: The Arab world shows astonishing variety in the use of the Arabic WP (blue) and those of the two colonial languages, English (red) and French (green). Other WPs and the "portal" category are grey. *Appears to be unreliable data. **Grey here is mostly the Spanish WP.

Fig. 3: Taiwan since 2009. The Chinese WP (green) is aligned with the left-side y-axis; en.WP (red) with the right side. The two y-axes are differently scaled.

Fig. 4: Brazil has seen fluctuations between English (red) and Portuguese (black).

Fig. 5: Switzerland has gone against the trend by moving away from German (blue), towards en.WP (red) and to a lesser extent French (green).

Tradução em curso -- ajuda bem-vinda

A Wikimedia Foundation disponibilizou seu último relatório para suas centenas de projetos. A WMF publica estatísticas dos seus projetos desde 2009, mas apenas recentemente essas estatísticas ganharam em escopo e profundidade para prover uma rica fonte de dados de investigação do movimento e seu universo. O holandês Erik Zachte direciona os resultados estatísticos da WMF, ele é um wikipedista desde 2002, trabalhando como analista de dados da fundação desde 2008.

As notícias são boas em relação a popularidade da Wikipédia: os acessos mensais para os 285 sites cresceram 25% de março de 2012 a março de 2013, incluindo um crescimento de 74% nos acessos a partir de dispositivos móveis. As wikipédias são vistas 22 bilhões de vezes ao mês -- mais de 8000 visitas por segundo -- uma média de 36 visitas para cada ser humano. Um fato interessante é que apenas 1 em cada 4 pessoas na Terra acessa a Internet.

Esta semana o Signpost apresenta miniaturas dessas estatísticas de acessos das diferentes Wikipédias, com um foco no relação entre os idiomas mais falados e o uso da Wikipédia em inglês. O que encontramos gera mais questões do que respostas, mas indica a extensão das oportunidades para análise de fenômenos internos e externos.

A Wikipédia Anglófona recebe 46,7% dos acessos (em 2009 era 53,4%), e permanece como dominante sobre os outros sites. As outras Wikipédias mais populares são espanhola e japonesa (com pouco mais de 7%), a russa (próximo de 6%), a alemã (5,4%) e a francesa (4,2%).

Wikipédia em inglês é mais popular sobre muitos não-nativos

Surpreendentemente, a razão média na qual os usuários de internet acessam a en.WP é maior em muitos países que nas seis maiores nações onde o inglês é o idioma nativo. Acima desses, en.WP é bem mais popular no Canadá, com 16 acessos por usuário de internet, e seria ainda maior se contasse o fato de mais de 1 em cada 5 canadenses é um falante nativo de francês. O Reuno Unido e a Irlanda vem logo depois, com 13 acessos por mês, seguidos pelos EUA, Austrália e Nova Zelândia com 11 acessos ao mês.

A média de acessos da en.WP dos usuários internet no norte global é de 11 ao mês (aproximadamente 3/4 de todos os acessos); Europa, América no norte, possuem a mesma média; Oceania (Austrália, Nova Zelândia e nações do Pacífico) tem 10; o sul global acessa a en.WP seis vezes ao mês (ou 1/4 dos acessos). Importante notar, as estatísticas de país por país contam múltiplos acessos de uma WP em qualquer dia como um único acesso.

O mundo Árabe

The tangled consequences of European colonisation are evident in profound differences in WP usage among the two dozen modern nation states that have significant ties to Arabic (Fig. 2). At 79%, the Arabic WP page-view rate is highest in the small state of Comoros off the Tanzanian coast, against 10.9% for en.WP and 2.4% for the French WP. This turns out to be on the extreme end of Arab usage, with a steady fall to less than a quarter in some countries, in favour of the colonial languages: overall, the Arabic WP is still the minority choice, against the English WP and, in places that were French colonies, the French WP.

These inconsistencies suggest that WP choice is complex and multifactorial: the Signpost has been told that nothing is certain, but factors could include a combination of (i) the proportion of internet users who read English (or French); (ii) the perceived quality and/or scope of the Arabic WP versus that of the English (or French) WPs; and (iii) political, educational, or social pressure to use or avoid a certain WP. Each of these factors, if they did play a part, would probably be the result of a number of component factors. While countries that share other languages—such as those that comprise the Spanish-speaking world—also show internal differences in their rate of en.WP views, they are not nearly as pronounced as in the Arab world.

The dynamics over time—country by country since 2009

Aside from the six major English-speaking countries, the WP viewing patterns of almost every country focus almost entirely on two WPs (in a few cases three); English is usually the second most popular, with tiny percentages going to other WPs. Over the past four years, the Arab world has seen particularly sharp movements away from the colonial languages towards the Arabic WP. Saudi Arabia, for example, has reversed from a 62/31 English/Arabic split to 42/52; this has been repeated almost exactly in Egypt, and to a lesser extent in some other Arab nations. Where French is a major choice, it too has tended to recede along with en.WP. To what extent is this related to the Arab spring, and a sense of increasing pride and independence in Arab culture and language? And to what extent is it a product of any greater scope and depth on the Arabic WP?

Since 2009, this significant move away from en.WP to the WPs of local languages has been repeated around the world, although not usually as dramatically as in Arabic-speaking countries. There are many distinctive and unexplained patterns. A common scenario is a vacillation between the English and local-language WPs, quarter by quarter, with an unexplained shift to and from English in 2010. Taiwan (Fig. 3) shows the swing from Chinese to English in 2010, and another such swing more recently, in a mirror image characteristic of many countries. (Figs. 3–5 have two y-axes, which are scaled differently, and not from zero, to illustrate this mirrored relationship and to save space.)

Brazil shows a similar relation between English and Portuguese, although there has been a slight move towards en.WP over the past six months. Every Portuguese-speaking country had a precipitous drop in the use of the Portuguese WP in 2010, including Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, East Timor, and Portugal itself. The Signpost has yet to ascertain whether this, and indeed the peak in en.WP traffic around the same time, were an artefact of the data-gathering system.

The three German-speaking countries—Germany, Austria, and Switzerland—have all seen a move away from German and towards English. It has been suggested that this may be connected with a resistance to the coverage of popular culture on the German WP. In Switzerland (Fig. 5), where French is also a major language, the popularity of German is more recently eroding in favour of English, and to a lesser extent French. Luxembourg has seen German usage fall significantly in favour of French and English. However, in neighbouring Belgium, both official languages—Dutch and French—have been gaining the edge on English.

Yet more is inexplicable. There has been movement from English to French in Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Niger, Guadeloupe, Haiti; but from French to English in Reunion, Madagascar, and Rwanda, with gyrations between French and English in Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, among other African countries. Panama is one of the few Spanish-speaking countries to be moving towards en.WP.

Expatriate choices—just one fascinating area for investigation

Interestingly, some major expatriate groups do not appear to align strongly with the WP of their native tongue: only 0.6% of American page views went to the Spanish WP, yet more than 12% of the US population speaks Spanish at home. Similarly, only 2.1% of views from Finland are to the Swedish WP, although nearly 6% of Finns are native Swedish-speakers and the language has equal status with Finnish as an official language. The WP preferences of minority language groups appears to be a complex issue. By comparison, large native Russian-speaker groups in countries such as the Balkan states that were assimilated into the Soviet Union for most of the 20th century appear to be using both the Russian and the local-language WPs in greater proportions at the expense of English.

Mais informações em: Wikipedia Report Card: summaries for 50 most visited languages.