Saturday, April 28, 2007

Ya era hora / it was about time...

The article count in the spanish wikipedia recently surprassed the "svenska" (swedish/sueco) version. That shouldn't come as a surprise... there's an estimated population of 9.8M swedish-speaking people on the planet (compared to roughly 0.5 billion in a very conservative estimate for spanish).

At some point spanish should take a more respectful place in the top 10 list. This move barely took it to language #9, and with the obvious expectation that chinese should enter that top 10 languages list, heading brutally fast into #1, things should remain almost unchanged for spanish... I'd count with spanish surpassing easily (in the near future) the article count of the wikipedias in portuguese, italian , polish, dutch.. and time will tell if it really has a shot vs japanese, french and german.

If anything it was surprising how far 10M people went (or the thirdy thousand contributors to the wikipedia or that language)... against the 385k contributors of the spanish version.

And there's an encouraging aspect there, if we are to approach it with a "half empty" view.. the spanish wikipedia has a lot of headroom to grow, if latins were to improve on education, and web particulation... passing the "hurdle" of the submissive behavior entrenched culturally and becoming more active, more opinionated.

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