One other thing to consider is the specifics of how a language
group/culture deals with collaborative work. I have no idea how to tackle
this, though I've seen some studies in that direction.
I'm sure some of you here have heard about the absolute mess and
conflict-ridden Portuguese Wikipedia. It's packed with hard deletionists,
very hostile to newcomers and split into groups constantly fighting for
power. I'm sure that's part of why PT:WP isn't bigger.
Juliana
On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 10:53 AM, Amir E. Aharoni <
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> Very interesting and much-needee research. Thanks for doing this. I'd love
> to see the results and even the process.
>
> Some things to consider:
> 1. How long is the tradition of having published encyclopedias in that
> culture?
> 2. Alphabet: Using a common alphabet may make it somewhat easier to
> translate information between languages that use it, especially for things
> like towns and biographies. The Korean alphabet is used only by one
> language, but the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets are used by many (with
> variations).
> 3. How long is the tradition of *actually* having public education for
> everybody: rich and poor, cities and villages? By "actually" I mean "not
> just by law, but in practice".
> 4. How long is the tradition of mostly-universal literacy? ("Literacy" is
> one of the most fuzzily defined concepts. Here I refer to something like
> "being able to read a newspaper and to write a one-page letter in one's own
> native language".)
> 5. How long is the tradition of having public libraries in most towns and
> villages?
> 6. How common is it to know other languages?
> 7. How isolated or open is the society that speaks this language in terms
> of access to media from other countries, translation of literature from
> other languages, travel to other countries?
> 8. How widespread are basic computer literacy skills: using a web browser;
> sending an email; copying, down/uploading, and deleting files.
> 9. How long is the tradition of having language resources, such as
> dictionaries, spelling standards, thesauri, style guides?
> 10. Is the language used completely in public education for teaching,
> textbooks, and homework? Or is the education mostly done in a foreign
> language? (This, roughly, is the situation in the Philippines and in many
> African countries.)
> 11. When did the language become an official language of a country? (If at
> all.)
> 12. Are there political, cultural, or government-suported movements for
> language development or preservation?
> 13. When did it become universally possible to fully write this language on
> a computer, with complete keyboards and fonts support? E.g., English has
> been easy to use on any computer for as long as there are computers;
> Polish, German, Russian and many other languages have been supported for a
> long time, but still struggled with encodings and diacritics in the 1990s;
> India and Burma are still struggling; I'm not sure about Korea.
>
> These are the immediate things I can think about. There are probably many
> more criteria that could be considered.
>
> The economics around a country are probably very important (poverty, access
> to infrastructure, healthcare, etc.), and you mentioned in your first email
> that you accounted for it, although I don't know in how much detail, so I
> trust you on that :)
>
>
> בתאריך 24 ביולי 2018 12:04, "Piotr Konieczny" <pio...@post.pl> כתב:
>
> Dear all,
>
> I am working on a paper on why/whether people contribute (or not) to
> collective intelligence differently projects in different countries. The
> paper was inspired, partially, by several discussions I had with various
> people on why different language Wikipedia's have different sizes,
> besides (doh) the popularity of the language (and yes, English is
> biggest because it is international; and yes, I am aware a few
> Wikipedias are outliers because of bots creating machine translations or
> auto-populating villages or such). But for example, Poland and South
> Korea have roughly similar population/speakers and development status,
> yet Polish Wikipedia is over 3x the size of the SK one and no bot can
> account for that. So, there's more to that. I am already feeding dozens
> of parameters to a spreadsheet for some modelling, but I a) wonder what
> I might have missed - before a reviewer asks 'why didn't you check for
> xyz' and b) would like to have a few nice sentences about how things
> that people expect to matter do not (or vice versa). Hence, my question
> to you all, in the form of this open question mini survey:
>
> Why do you think different language Wikipedia's have different sizes,
> outside of the popularity of a given language?
>
> For reference, list of Wikipedias by size and language:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
>
> TIA!
>
>
> --
> Piotr Konieczny, PhD
> http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny
> http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
>
>
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