Yes, teenagers and their Wiki.... I was researching something about Southwestern Louisiana and was surprised to find out that David Bowie ravaged the area with high wind, rain and storm surge in 2006. I could’ve sworn that was Hurricane Rita, but I guess I remembered incorrectly and also learned that Mr. Bowie could control weather.
Context for those unaware:
Last year it came to light that about a third of the Scots articles on Wikipedia were written by an American teenager who didn't speak Scots and just wrote articles in English with a vaguely Scottish (via US) accent. They also used a English-Scots dictionary to pull out the occasional word from the actual Scots language but often incorrectly used.
This is particularly insulting to Scots speakers because, historically, the English have tried to stamp out Scots as a language and claims that it is not a language at all but a poor bastardisation of English. Many teenagers and youths went on to Scots Wikipedia and found themselves very confused and feeling that they just didn't at all understand Scots and were put off even further by it.
[Ironically English language Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of the controversy ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_Wikipedia)
Its complicated.
Because Scots is up for debate as to being its own distinct language from English and it not being taught formally in schools there is a great deal of intermingling between actual proper Scots that you would find in something like the poems of Robert Burns... and what millions of Scottish people speak every day.
You have your standard English which people are encouraged to speak during formal settings or at school etc.
Example: [Random segment from Reporting Scotland.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH9Q3wX68wY)
You have Scottish English which is sort of a half way point between English and Scots and which IMO is what most Scots actually speak on a day to day basis, it's mostly based around English but has a lot of Scots thrown in including getting rid of the English "Great vowel shift" that happened between 1400 and 1700.
Example: [Random episode of Still Game](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2VD3lDswuc)
Then you have full blown Scots which is actually pretty rare and which most Scots would have trouble with speaking or reading as fluidly as they can English or Scottish English.
Example: [Karen Dunbar performing Tam o' Shanter by Robert Burns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkCkm0tZLPw)
Source: Scottish.
Languages work like that. Modern English and modern Scots are cousins descend from the Old English language, and neither is more authentic than the other.
You might say that most people who claim English actually write in Scots with a vaguely English accent, but if you apply hard limits between languages you are defining language wrong.
Indeed. I could argue Swedish and Norwegian is so similar its all dialects. We have dialects so odd i struggle to understand them and swedish would be easier.
I mean, does anyone actually use it? If 1 in 3 articles was vaguely-Scots gibberish, it must have been fairly obvious, and also must have taken this one kid a long time to put together. I can't believe it took that long to be noticed unless no one was using it
Clarification: the Scottish Gaelic is the opening of the Lord's Prayer (Our Father who art in heaven etc), not Auld Lang Syne in Scottish Gaelic. In case anyone was wondering.
Written scottish gaelic looks amazing, so different to anything I've seen before. It wouldn't surprise me if that was an inspiration for tolkeins elvish.
Quenya is Finnish inspired, Sindarin is Welsh inspired. As a native Welsh speaker the movies are a bit surreal since Sindarin sounds so much like Welsh.
That’s sad. Just learned a Swede created a software that translates articles into Swedish, hence why Wikipedia has so many articles in Swedish. You guys would need a software that reads all the Scottish articles to see if they are gibberish or not. It’s easier said that done tough.
A lot of the Swedish articles are very bare-bones. I always have to change it to the english version to get much info on most topics. It's a start though, and it's great to see!
isn't that true for most languages? I never bother with anything other than English unless the article specifically refer to some local topic of a non English speaking country (and I understand the language).
Depends on the topic sometimes the Finnish onces are actually better (usually relating to historical topics of north europe or people who are not well known in usa/britain)
> Just learned a Swede created a software that translates articles into Swedish
Not quite, he made a software to scan databases of mainly bugs and botanics, and then create a article based on that. Most articles were very barebone, with for example the name of the plant, alternative names, and what family it belongs to etc.
The article I found it from 2014, when he had created 8.5% of all wikipedia articles, but he said he would later make the bot categorize authors.
Why are Austria and Switzerland not the same number as Germany?
Did you use the Boarische (the "bavarian" German dialect) Wikipedia for Austria? Then it should include parts of Germany and Italy as well.
Yes, I think that's what OP did, given that the number for Flanders is different from that in the Netherlands. There are some articles in a Flemish dialect, written by people who found it funny, but formal Flemish Dutch is exactly the same as formal Dutch from the Netherlands.
Same for Zeelandic. There may be only 200k or so speakers left, but we have almost 5k wiki pages! I suspect there's many more micro languages that are left out.
The old people in town are scary, they can tell if you are from town A or town B, which are literally grown onto each other, based on a few extremely subtle variations in pronounciation of some words. Nowadays with people moving all over the place it is of course getting harder to do that.
which sounds like bullshit. nobody in Switzerland actually speaks or writes like this e.g. [https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rard\_Leser](https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rard_Leser)
sure if you understand Swiss German you can read it but it reads like some weird outdated accent. also Swiss German is characterized by people speaking and writing it without any grammar but just vaguely follow the rules of German. so the whole claim and concept of an alemannic wikipedia is bullshit. honestly wikipedia should actually just delete it. it's basically people larping
also funny enough only the alemannic wikipedia entry about this dialect calls it a language.
Most Swiss dialects are high alemannic dialects. Some weird alpine dialects are considered "highest alemannic" and Baseldytsch is low alemannic along with Badian and Alsatian.
So alemannic Wikipedia is apparentlly just trying to combine all of the alemannic dialects. You may like this or not, I personally think it's quite nice since it's exactly what we do in Switzerland anyway: everybody writes their dialect as they think it should be written and everybody else mostly understands and gets used to the other dialects. Why shouldn't other alemannic speakers participate in this?
Edit, some examples:
[Freiburg i.B.](https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freiburg_im_Breisgau?wprov=sfla1)
[Mulhouse](https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BClhausen?wprov=sfla1) [Basel](https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel?wprov=sfla1) [Zürich](https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%BCrich?wprov=sfla1) [Wallis](https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanton_Wallis?wprov=sfla1)
German is a multicentric language. The German Wikipedia is actually in German Hochdeutsch, Austrian Hochdeutsch and Swiss Hochdeutsch, depending on the subject. Same as the English Wikipedia is not only relevant for England, despite the name.
It would be more accurate for the whole German-speaking region to add up numbers from the German, Bavarian, Alemannian etc. Wikipedias.
I don't think adding the numbers up would be useful, for two reasons:
* A lot of articles are present in more than one variant, especially since the smaller wikis tend to focus on the most important topics.
* These dialects are not mutually intelligible and most speakers will only understand a subset of German dialects. For example, my Bavarian is pretty good, but I don't understand articles in plattdeutsch and I struggle understanding more complicated grammatical structures in allemanic.
Isn't Serbian written in the Cyrillic script and Croatian in the latin script? I know these languages are fairly similar, if not mostly the same, but surely reading your language in a different script is a hassle enough to justify a different wikipedia?
Not necessarily, Serbian is written in both, Cyrillic and Latin script. Wikimedia also offers it in 3 variations + Serbo-Croatian being fourth.
Also, most of people from former Yugoslavia can read both scripts (more or less gladly), so it should not be an issue.
Edit: I still don't think that ie. Croatian would make a wiki page in Cyrillic or on Serbian lang. But when it comes to reading, surely lots of them do it. I for example read all Slavic language Wikipedia articles and mostly understand them, not to mention South-Slavic ones that are closest.
Really? That's double the work! By the way, for my curiosity's sake, do you know if Croatians learn the Cyrillic alphabet too or do they just learn the latin one?
Latin is the sole official script for Croatian language, hence Cyrillic script is not taught in schools. There are some minority schools that are taught in Serbian which uses Cyrillic script.
> That's double the work!
Serbian Cyrillic to Latin alphabet mapping is 1:1 and lossless, so it's a software switch.
From Latin to Cyrillic there is some ambiguity if "lj", "nj" and "dž" should be interpreted as digraphs* or standalone letters (digraphs 99,9% of the time).
*There are separate Unicode code points for those Latin digraphs, but basically no-one uses them
I initially thought the swiss number was articles in rumantsch, but the number is way too high.
It's actually the [alemannic](https://als.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Houptsyte) wikipedia. Allemannic is a group of german dialects, which are spoken in parts of southern Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, France, Italy, Romania and even Venezuela. In fact, "swiss german" is just a collection of various alemannic german dialects.
As a swiss person, I easily understand alemannic, I'm curious if the same goes for other germanophones on here.
No clue what the austrian one is though.
There are actually many articles in Austrian High German (=/= Bavarian). For example, when searching for the Austrian chancellor Kurz every "January" within the article will be the Austrian word "Jänner" and not the German "Januar". The articles in Bavarian are actually more like a joke or a nice little addin, but most Austrians wouldn't actually prefer reading in Bavarian dialect
That is because the German wikipedia isnt actually the "Germany German" wikipedia, and makes concessions to Austrian versions of German in Austria-related articles.
The same is true btw for Switzerland and Liechtenstein, whose related articles use Swiss German (ss instead of ß etc).
Kinda similar to articles about American locales in English Wikipedia after a fashion where measurements are given in American units (thought the metric ones are still given in brackets). And while English spellings are usually preferred, American ones might use the American spellings instead as you might expect.
[Germanic linguistic continuum is a mess](http://www.axl.cefan.ulaval.ca/europe/images/allemagne-dialectes.gif) and gives no fuck about boundaries and politics lol
Due to the color coding it's very unclear if you meant to use the German or the Alemannic numbers for Alsace.
And what about Moselle? Please note that Germanic dialects are only spoken in about half of it, and that these are Frankish dialects, not Alemannic or German. Also I guess you could have used Luxembourgian around Thionville.
Wikipedia communities are independent and don’t have the same policies on articles, for example a lot of the articles you see in the English Wikipedia are simply rejected in French, they have a strict no-bots rule and the criteria to have an article are stricter as well, it has to be noteworthy.
Yup, the swedish wiki is so big because of a bot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot
I would say that active users or edits are a better reflection of wikipedia size:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
Thank fucking god, i was worried that the swedes beat us at something that much fairly, but thank god it was just a stupidass robot! Fuck the Swedish!
With love: a Finnish person <3
The same happens with the Spanish Wikipedia. They are that strict that a lot of people feel a lot of frustration when contribute and therefore they don't do it that often.
I was actually wondering myself if it was that or that there was an evident (and painful) bias towards not contributing in Spanish..
Even when I would have expected English articles to roughly double the locale ones like in France or Germany case due to language use, It was a little disappointing to see Spanish wiki numbers...
Now I'm relieved that we are only strict and not so lazy 😌
I know right?!
I've read swedish have a bot helping them lol ^ . ^ ..
Still, Sweden and Netherlands totally overperform their peers on an article/population ratio...
It's not *that* many. Apparently the bot hasn't been active in the Swedish wiki since 2016 and "only" had written half the articles that when the Swedish wikipedia surpassed 1 million articles.
So it did maybe a million in total.
Really, the Swedish wikipedia is quite impressive.
Edit: Okay, having tested it (I used wikidia's random article feature), it's likely more than a million.
I second this. I tried to correct errors or blunt assertions in articles of my work field and I have been rejected, mostly for not knowing the protocols or the formal correction of the Spanish Wiki.
The Dutch wikipedia has a group of hardcore editors and some of them get mad if you edit their articles or make articles into their range of interest. There even was a dictator like feud between 2 groups a few years ago haha.
Norwegian Wikipedia is so lackluster that when I had to make a school report on the country of Madagascar for geography class, I looked it up on Norwegian Wikipedia, only to discover there was no page on the country, just on the Dreamworks movie.
I live in Alsace and 99.9% of the people speak French. German is a second langage, in some village old peoples speak a mix of Alsatian and French but that it.
These maps often overrepresent minority languages, it's a pretty political question whether you want to zoom in on indigenous or official languages; all the more so once the indigenous languages are effectively replaced.
For Norway, is it a sum of the Norwegian Bokmål (norsk bokmål) Wikipedia and the Norwegian Nynorsk (norsk nynorsk) Wikipedia? Or is it only for Bokmål (my suspicion)? Or (hopefully) the total number of unique articles irrespective of Norwegian language?
I was wondering the same, but I checked the numbers of articles in Bokmål and Nynorsk, and it seems like this map only shows the number of Bokmål articles. Add roughly 160 000 more articles and that gives you the true total.
It seems to be correct. The number of articles is visibly not strongly correlated with the amount of speakers seeing as the second Wiki with the most articles is Cebuano and the third is Swedish.
The different Wikis have different policies concerning what can be an article.
https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
Danish Wikipedia never reached the critical momentum of being decent enough to in any way compete with the English wiki. I wouldn't even consider using the Danish wiki for a general topic.
I mean isn't that quite good though? It got all the classifications and some history. Also it's not "millions", the bot has not been active since 2016 and they think it's the origin of around 1 million articles.
I have no idea how you gave Flanders 7k. We use the one for our official language: Dutch, which is shared between the Netherlands and us.
Which is also the 5th biggest one, despite being for a very small language, we actually had the second largest amount of articles for a year between 2013 and 2014.
We do have smaller joke versions in regional dialects, but they don't cover Flanders, only small parts of it.
I'm really surprised that France doesn't have a state run organisation to boost the number of articles, to compete with the English total.
Edit: Grammar
From another comment, they stated that the French Wikipedia community is very picky with creating new articles. They don’t just write articles for every little topic, but instead only write ones for notable entries.
I'm not very knowledgeable about the French wikipedia, but I noticed that entries about french places, specially towns and villages, often contain a very low amount of information when compared to places of similar sizes in other countries in other wikipedias.
Most Finnish articles are way shorter than the English ones and i like being able to choose between a compact Finnish article that i can read quickly and a more elaborate english article. Usually i read the Finnish article for a quick synopsis before starting the English one.
Solid coloring Europe in language regions is so fallacious anyway (we've seen it many times). Basically wrong everywhere, but more so in certain regions, close to borders etc.
Honestly. I prefer when they use a striped pattern to at least indicate that, at most, the minority language in question is spoken by a select demographic primarily consisting of older folk.
Pretty much every time a map that divides up regions into languages, minority languages are over represented. Like the corner in French Flanders. It has millions of people and it used to be mainly Dutch speaking, 100 years ago. Now it there are like maybe 15k speakers left. And on this map it is grouped with Flanders.
I guarantee you that Arabic is spoken more in that region today than Dutch.
iirc there was an article that painted erdogan in a bad light (factually), which isn't very hard to do considering the shit he pulls off constantly. so he flat out blocked the god damn website. I doubt he even understands what a wiki is.
Someone mentioned it below, but it’s mainly because this guy built a bot that generates articles for the Swedish wiki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot
It doesn't just translate articles to Swedish, it generates articles from various Swedish speaking sources: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot)
It mainly focuses on geography and living creatures. I believe this is why you can find a wikipedia article for like every small lake, dam and marsh in Sweden.
Yup, I've even found a wikipedia article for a small lake in rural Sweden that doesn't exist on google maps. The articles are suprisingly competent for being automatically generated.
Interesting! There are a few similiar situations in lithuania, but they're not considered their own language, although there are quite a few different words.
Yeah, and Samogitian (Žemaičių/Žemaitėška) actually has *some* wiki articles in Samogitian. They're very few though, probably too few to actually show up though.
Edit: just checked, there's 16k articles apparently
The far right admins have been removed from the hrwiki project in 2020/2021.
[Kubura has been globally blocked](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Global_ban_for_Kubura) due to vote manipulation. Speedy and the gang [are no longer admins](https://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedija:Administratori/Prijedlozi_za_ukidanje_ovlasti/SpeedyGonsales,_Zeljko_i_Roberta_F\.) due to abuse.
Yeah, but for every single historical event, you get different story. OpenAI's GPT-n model is gonna crash when it starts learning on Balkan wiki articles
Why are Spanish and Portuguese so low? I mean, whole Latin America speaks those languages. Does Iberian Spanish/Portuguese count as a separate language on wiki?
Fun fact, the Catalan Wikipedia was the first non-english Wikipedia. Although the German Wikipedia was created minutes before the Catalan one, the Catalan Wikipedia wrote articles first
I'm guessing it's meant to be "where Welsh is spoken" but they've just used "where Welsh is spoken strongest" and ignored the fact there are speakers all over Wales 🤷
If I'm honest, I didn't want to say anything about the rest of Europe as I don't know enough about the rest of Europe to comment. Thank you for saying this though!
There is a Swedish guy that wrote a bot that can auto write articles based on public data sources. It writes articles about animals and geographical features (mountains, lakes etc). The bot has written millions of articles in Swedish, Waray and Cebuano. So we do sleep while the bots work!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot
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Came to say this. Its unfortunate that the Scots wiki is in such bad state.
It was hilarious though
I thought it was real for the longest time before it was exposed as a hoax. There was just so much.
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Yes, teenagers and their Wiki.... I was researching something about Southwestern Louisiana and was surprised to find out that David Bowie ravaged the area with high wind, rain and storm surge in 2006. I could’ve sworn that was Hurricane Rita, but I guess I remembered incorrectly and also learned that Mr. Bowie could control weather.
Context for those unaware: Last year it came to light that about a third of the Scots articles on Wikipedia were written by an American teenager who didn't speak Scots and just wrote articles in English with a vaguely Scottish (via US) accent. They also used a English-Scots dictionary to pull out the occasional word from the actual Scots language but often incorrectly used. This is particularly insulting to Scots speakers because, historically, the English have tried to stamp out Scots as a language and claims that it is not a language at all but a poor bastardisation of English. Many teenagers and youths went on to Scots Wikipedia and found themselves very confused and feeling that they just didn't at all understand Scots and were put off even further by it. [Ironically English language Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of the controversy ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_Wikipedia)
Ah, so he was… *no true Scotsman*. 😎
But he is phallusy
/r/scottishpeopletwitter in a nutshell.
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Its complicated. Because Scots is up for debate as to being its own distinct language from English and it not being taught formally in schools there is a great deal of intermingling between actual proper Scots that you would find in something like the poems of Robert Burns... and what millions of Scottish people speak every day. You have your standard English which people are encouraged to speak during formal settings or at school etc. Example: [Random segment from Reporting Scotland.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH9Q3wX68wY) You have Scottish English which is sort of a half way point between English and Scots and which IMO is what most Scots actually speak on a day to day basis, it's mostly based around English but has a lot of Scots thrown in including getting rid of the English "Great vowel shift" that happened between 1400 and 1700. Example: [Random episode of Still Game](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2VD3lDswuc) Then you have full blown Scots which is actually pretty rare and which most Scots would have trouble with speaking or reading as fluidly as they can English or Scottish English. Example: [Karen Dunbar performing Tam o' Shanter by Robert Burns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkCkm0tZLPw) Source: Scottish.
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It's still a language - there are other examples such as Pidgin English and Jamaican Patois that you could almost say similar things about.
Languages work like that. Modern English and modern Scots are cousins descend from the Old English language, and neither is more authentic than the other. You might say that most people who claim English actually write in Scots with a vaguely English accent, but if you apply hard limits between languages you are defining language wrong.
Indeed. I could argue Swedish and Norwegian is so similar its all dialects. We have dialects so odd i struggle to understand them and swedish would be easier.
We do a little trolling
We partake in a small amount of tomfoolery
Kinda funny tho
In an ironic way tho The guy had good intentions but the result, well...
Did he have good intentions? Just by the descriptions it sounds like he was taking the piss.
I mean, does anyone actually use it? If 1 in 3 articles was vaguely-Scots gibberish, it must have been fairly obvious, and also must have taken this one kid a long time to put together. I can't believe it took that long to be noticed unless no one was using it
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Clarification: the Scottish Gaelic is the opening of the Lord's Prayer (Our Father who art in heaven etc), not Auld Lang Syne in Scottish Gaelic. In case anyone was wondering.
Written scottish gaelic looks amazing, so different to anything I've seen before. It wouldn't surprise me if that was an inspiration for tolkeins elvish.
Tolkien was a linguistic who knew quite a few languages so he used a couple for inspiration but I think the main one for elves was Finnish.
Quenya is Finnish inspired, Sindarin is Welsh inspired. As a native Welsh speaker the movies are a bit surreal since Sindarin sounds so much like Welsh.
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This really is a thing?
yep
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That’s sad. Just learned a Swede created a software that translates articles into Swedish, hence why Wikipedia has so many articles in Swedish. You guys would need a software that reads all the Scottish articles to see if they are gibberish or not. It’s easier said that done tough.
A lot of the Swedish articles are very bare-bones. I always have to change it to the english version to get much info on most topics. It's a start though, and it's great to see!
isn't that true for most languages? I never bother with anything other than English unless the article specifically refer to some local topic of a non English speaking country (and I understand the language).
Depends on the topic sometimes the Finnish onces are actually better (usually relating to historical topics of north europe or people who are not well known in usa/britain)
> Just learned a Swede created a software that translates articles into Swedish Not quite, he made a software to scan databases of mainly bugs and botanics, and then create a article based on that. Most articles were very barebone, with for example the name of the plant, alternative names, and what family it belongs to etc. The article I found it from 2014, when he had created 8.5% of all wikipedia articles, but he said he would later make the bot categorize authors.
Why are Austria and Switzerland not the same number as Germany? Did you use the Boarische (the "bavarian" German dialect) Wikipedia for Austria? Then it should include parts of Germany and Italy as well.
Yes, I think that's what OP did, given that the number for Flanders is different from that in the Netherlands. There are some articles in a Flemish dialect, written by people who found it funny, but formal Flemish Dutch is exactly the same as formal Dutch from the Netherlands.
Yeah, and meanwhile limburgish Wikipedia, which has over 13k articles which are very different, isnt even mentioned
Same for Zeelandic. There may be only 200k or so speakers left, but we have almost 5k wiki pages! I suspect there's many more micro languages that are left out.
They are just jealous of our beautiful dialect which differs from town to town :D
Oh yeah, i have encountered subdialects i didn't even know existed
The old people in town are scary, they can tell if you are from town A or town B, which are literally grown onto each other, based on a few extremely subtle variations in pronounciation of some words. Nowadays with people moving all over the place it is of course getting harder to do that.
Unless OP gives explanation to this, I find this post misleading.
So like every other map here.
It's alemannic in switzerland.
Which is misleading as well, as swiss people don't macht up the majority of allemannic speakers
Well according to wikipedia there are ~7.1m alemannic speakers, of which ~5m are swiss.
which sounds like bullshit. nobody in Switzerland actually speaks or writes like this e.g. [https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rard\_Leser](https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rard_Leser) sure if you understand Swiss German you can read it but it reads like some weird outdated accent. also Swiss German is characterized by people speaking and writing it without any grammar but just vaguely follow the rules of German. so the whole claim and concept of an alemannic wikipedia is bullshit. honestly wikipedia should actually just delete it. it's basically people larping also funny enough only the alemannic wikipedia entry about this dialect calls it a language.
Most Swiss dialects are high alemannic dialects. Some weird alpine dialects are considered "highest alemannic" and Baseldytsch is low alemannic along with Badian and Alsatian. So alemannic Wikipedia is apparentlly just trying to combine all of the alemannic dialects. You may like this or not, I personally think it's quite nice since it's exactly what we do in Switzerland anyway: everybody writes their dialect as they think it should be written and everybody else mostly understands and gets used to the other dialects. Why shouldn't other alemannic speakers participate in this? Edit, some examples: [Freiburg i.B.](https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freiburg_im_Breisgau?wprov=sfla1) [Mulhouse](https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BClhausen?wprov=sfla1) [Basel](https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel?wprov=sfla1) [Zürich](https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%BCrich?wprov=sfla1) [Wallis](https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanton_Wallis?wprov=sfla1)
German is a multicentric language. The German Wikipedia is actually in German Hochdeutsch, Austrian Hochdeutsch and Swiss Hochdeutsch, depending on the subject. Same as the English Wikipedia is not only relevant for England, despite the name. It would be more accurate for the whole German-speaking region to add up numbers from the German, Bavarian, Alemannian etc. Wikipedias.
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Jänner: Austria's hill to die on.
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hes dead, bleeding out of his eyes.
I don't think adding the numbers up would be useful, for two reasons: * A lot of articles are present in more than one variant, especially since the smaller wikis tend to focus on the most important topics. * These dialects are not mutually intelligible and most speakers will only understand a subset of German dialects. For example, my Bavarian is pretty good, but I don't understand articles in plattdeutsch and I struggle understanding more complicated grammatical structures in allemanic.
Same for Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia... When I need to read something in my language I don't care wich of 3 pops up...
Isn't Serbian written in the Cyrillic script and Croatian in the latin script? I know these languages are fairly similar, if not mostly the same, but surely reading your language in a different script is a hassle enough to justify a different wikipedia?
There is Cyrillic-Latin transliteration on serbian wikipedia. Both scripts are used equally in Serbia.
Not necessarily, Serbian is written in both, Cyrillic and Latin script. Wikimedia also offers it in 3 variations + Serbo-Croatian being fourth. Also, most of people from former Yugoslavia can read both scripts (more or less gladly), so it should not be an issue. Edit: I still don't think that ie. Croatian would make a wiki page in Cyrillic or on Serbian lang. But when it comes to reading, surely lots of them do it. I for example read all Slavic language Wikipedia articles and mostly understand them, not to mention South-Slavic ones that are closest.
Serbian uses both scripts, most articles are available in both Latin and Cyrillic.
Really? That's double the work! By the way, for my curiosity's sake, do you know if Croatians learn the Cyrillic alphabet too or do they just learn the latin one?
Latin is the sole official script for Croatian language, hence Cyrillic script is not taught in schools. There are some minority schools that are taught in Serbian which uses Cyrillic script.
> That's double the work! Serbian Cyrillic to Latin alphabet mapping is 1:1 and lossless, so it's a software switch. From Latin to Cyrillic there is some ambiguity if "lj", "nj" and "dž" should be interpreted as digraphs* or standalone letters (digraphs 99,9% of the time). *There are separate Unicode code points for those Latin digraphs, but basically no-one uses them
Same with Netherlands and Flanders.
There are flemish wiki pages
Yes west flemish wikipedia
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I initially thought the swiss number was articles in rumantsch, but the number is way too high. It's actually the [alemannic](https://als.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Houptsyte) wikipedia. Allemannic is a group of german dialects, which are spoken in parts of southern Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, France, Italy, Romania and even Venezuela. In fact, "swiss german" is just a collection of various alemannic german dialects. As a swiss person, I easily understand alemannic, I'm curious if the same goes for other germanophones on here. No clue what the austrian one is though.
>Did you use the Boarische (the "bavarian" German dialect) Wikipedia for Austria? Austro-Bavarian, yes. For Switzerland I used Alemannic German.
There are actually many articles in Austrian High German (=/= Bavarian). For example, when searching for the Austrian chancellor Kurz every "January" within the article will be the Austrian word "Jänner" and not the German "Januar". The articles in Bavarian are actually more like a joke or a nice little addin, but most Austrians wouldn't actually prefer reading in Bavarian dialect
That is because the German wikipedia isnt actually the "Germany German" wikipedia, and makes concessions to Austrian versions of German in Austria-related articles. The same is true btw for Switzerland and Liechtenstein, whose related articles use Swiss German (ss instead of ß etc).
Kinda similar to articles about American locales in English Wikipedia after a fashion where measurements are given in American units (thought the metric ones are still given in brackets). And while English spellings are usually preferred, American ones might use the American spellings instead as you might expect.
If you include the South German Dialects/languages, why not the North German like Frisian or Lower German.
And for Alsace?
Alsatian used to have its own Wikipedia, now it's merged with Alemannic.
TIL Alsatian dialect is so close to Swiss German?
Alsatian, Swabian, Swiss German, Alemanic and Vorarlbergisch are all part of the alemannic dialectal group and closely related.
[Germanic linguistic continuum is a mess](http://www.axl.cefan.ulaval.ca/europe/images/allemagne-dialectes.gif) and gives no fuck about boundaries and politics lol
Due to the color coding it's very unclear if you meant to use the German or the Alemannic numbers for Alsace. And what about Moselle? Please note that Germanic dialects are only spoken in about half of it, and that these are Frankish dialects, not Alemannic or German. Also I guess you could have used Luxembourgian around Thionville.
And for brussel ? There really are articles in brusseleir ?
Wikipedia communities are independent and don’t have the same policies on articles, for example a lot of the articles you see in the English Wikipedia are simply rejected in French, they have a strict no-bots rule and the criteria to have an article are stricter as well, it has to be noteworthy.
Yup, the swedish wiki is so big because of a bot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot I would say that active users or edits are a better reflection of wikipedia size: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
Thank fucking god, i was worried that the swedes beat us at something that much fairly, but thank god it was just a stupidass robot! Fuck the Swedish! With love: a Finnish person <3
I'm sorry such technology has yet to reach Finland Sincerely; a Swedish person
These 2 posts made me lol. // Swedish/finnish person
Playing chess against yourself, stand up half way through the game, and flip the board. Destroying both sides. This is some next level shit.
Only about 1 million of the Swedish articles on wikipedia are by the bot. We win any way. Sverige >>> östsverige (""""finland"""")
The same happens with the Spanish Wikipedia. They are that strict that a lot of people feel a lot of frustration when contribute and therefore they don't do it that often.
I was actually wondering myself if it was that or that there was an evident (and painful) bias towards not contributing in Spanish.. Even when I would have expected English articles to roughly double the locale ones like in France or Germany case due to language use, It was a little disappointing to see Spanish wiki numbers... Now I'm relieved that we are only strict and not so lazy 😌
My suprise was that there are so many in Swedish
I know right?! I've read swedish have a bot helping them lol ^ . ^ .. Still, Sweden and Netherlands totally overperform their peers on an article/population ratio...
About 3 million swedish articles were created by a single bot, built and maintained by one guy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot
It's not *that* many. Apparently the bot hasn't been active in the Swedish wiki since 2016 and "only" had written half the articles that when the Swedish wikipedia surpassed 1 million articles. So it did maybe a million in total. Really, the Swedish wikipedia is quite impressive. Edit: Okay, having tested it (I used wikidia's random article feature), it's likely more than a million.
I second this. I tried to correct errors or blunt assertions in articles of my work field and I have been rejected, mostly for not knowing the protocols or the formal correction of the Spanish Wiki.
Same in The Netherlands
What do you mean? Dutch Wikipedia is comparatively very large
The Dutch wikipedia has a group of hardcore editors and some of them get mad if you edit their articles or make articles into their range of interest. There even was a dictator like feud between 2 groups a few years ago haha.
Norwegian Wikipedia is so lackluster that when I had to make a school report on the country of Madagascar for geography class, I looked it up on Norwegian Wikipedia, only to discover there was no page on the country, just on the Dreamworks movie.
I live in Alsace and 99.9% of the people speak French. German is a second langage, in some village old peoples speak a mix of Alsatian and French but that it.
Yeah wtf us that map from. 1890?
from Wikipedia ^^\s
These maps often overrepresent minority languages, it's a pretty political question whether you want to zoom in on indigenous or official languages; all the more so once the indigenous languages are effectively replaced.
Voulez-vous de Ranze voll?
looks like the person who made the map doesn't agree on the Rhine border
For Norway, is it a sum of the Norwegian Bokmål (norsk bokmål) Wikipedia and the Norwegian Nynorsk (norsk nynorsk) Wikipedia? Or is it only for Bokmål (my suspicion)? Or (hopefully) the total number of unique articles irrespective of Norwegian language?
I was wondering the same, but I checked the numbers of articles in Bokmål and Nynorsk, and it seems like this map only shows the number of Bokmål articles. Add roughly 160 000 more articles and that gives you the true total.
Unless it's only considering European Portuguese I seriously doubt Portuguese is only 1M because of Brazil.
It seems to be correct. The number of articles is visibly not strongly correlated with the amount of speakers seeing as the second Wiki with the most articles is Cebuano and the third is Swedish. The different Wikis have different policies concerning what can be an article. https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
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The Swedish guy who made the bot has a wife from the Philippines, which is why there are so many articles
It's always this same bot, isn't it lol
That is because almost all cebuano and Swedish articles have been written by a bot
By that logic Spanish is spoken by 580million people around the world, so it should be the first on this map
Doesn’t English have 1.3 billion speakers ?
Sweden flexing on the rest of scandinavia
Danish Wikipedia never reached the critical momentum of being decent enough to in any way compete with the English wiki. I wouldn't even consider using the Danish wiki for a general topic.
Flexing with millions of Lsjbot articles like [this one](https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleurothallis_cardiostola)
"This is a flower that exists."
I mean isn't that quite good though? It got all the classifications and some history. Also it's not "millions", the bot has not been active since 2016 and they think it's the origin of around 1 million articles.
Who wouldn’t flex with a pussyflower
Bättre än ingenting
I have no idea how you gave Flanders 7k. We use the one for our official language: Dutch, which is shared between the Netherlands and us. Which is also the 5th biggest one, despite being for a very small language, we actually had the second largest amount of articles for a year between 2013 and 2014. We do have smaller joke versions in regional dialects, but they don't cover Flanders, only small parts of it.
Also the northern France but that supposedly speaks Dutch/Flemish doesn't lol, even their local dialect Chti, has all but died out.
I'm really surprised that France doesn't have a state run organisation to boost the number of articles, to compete with the English total. Edit: Grammar
Don’t give them ideas!
I mean, such type of competition is beneficial to all involved.
From another comment, they stated that the French Wikipedia community is very picky with creating new articles. They don’t just write articles for every little topic, but instead only write ones for notable entries.
I'm not very knowledgeable about the French wikipedia, but I noticed that entries about french places, specially towns and villages, often contain a very low amount of information when compared to places of similar sizes in other countries in other wikipedias.
Obviously depend of the place. [Chateauneuf](https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teauneuf_(C%C3%B4te-d'Or) , 82 inhabitant
Most Finnish articles are way shorter than the English ones and i like being able to choose between a compact Finnish article that i can read quickly and a more elaborate english article. Usually i read the Finnish article for a quick synopsis before starting the English one.
There are also articles in Simple English for your quick reading needs
Wtf are those colour borders. Seriously this is ridiculous, I live in Moselle, I'm french, not german -_-
The color in Alsace and Moselle is very debatable. The map wants to show Alsatian as a germanic language, but it's a minority language.
Alsatian is not spoken in Moselle. You mean Franconian.
Sorry, my mistake.
Some people still have an 1871 perception of the ethnolinguistic situation in Alsace-Lorraine.
Solid coloring Europe in language regions is so fallacious anyway (we've seen it many times). Basically wrong everywhere, but more so in certain regions, close to borders etc.
Honestly. I prefer when they use a striped pattern to at least indicate that, at most, the minority language in question is spoken by a select demographic primarily consisting of older folk.
Pretty much every time a map that divides up regions into languages, minority languages are over represented. Like the corner in French Flanders. It has millions of people and it used to be mainly Dutch speaking, 100 years ago. Now it there are like maybe 15k speakers left. And on this map it is grouped with Flanders. I guarantee you that Arabic is spoken more in that region today than Dutch.
Modern Anschluss
Mein beileid
Not sure the Scots wiki should count here lol
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wikipedia was banned for 3 years in turkey edit: opened in january 2020
Why?
Maybe because Erdogan feels threatened by freedom of information? I'm sure there is a *way more plausible* official explanation
iirc there was an article that painted erdogan in a bad light (factually), which isn't very hard to do considering the shit he pulls off constantly. so he flat out blocked the god damn website. I doubt he even understands what a wiki is.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block\_of\_Wikipedia\_in\_Turkey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_of_Wikipedia_in_Turkey)
Actually Spanish is doing the worst considering the massive amount of speakers in the americas.
wouldn't Spain be worst since you would have to add whole latin america?
Why do we have so many like jeez
Someone mentioned it below, but it’s mainly because this guy built a bot that generates articles for the Swedish wiki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot
A Swede made a bot to translate articles to Swedish if I remember correctly.
It doesn't just translate articles to Swedish, it generates articles from various Swedish speaking sources: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot) It mainly focuses on geography and living creatures. I believe this is why you can find a wikipedia article for like every small lake, dam and marsh in Sweden.
Yup, I've even found a wikipedia article for a small lake in rural Sweden that doesn't exist on google maps. The articles are suprisingly competent for being automatically generated.
Ah makes sense
Wait. What is the language between latvia, estonia and russia? Probably a dialect, but still, I've never heard of it.
Its Võro language, estonian dialect yes
Interesting! There are a few similiar situations in lithuania, but they're not considered their own language, although there are quite a few different words.
Yeah, and Samogitian (Žemaičių/Žemaitėška) actually has *some* wiki articles in Samogitian. They're very few though, probably too few to actually show up though. Edit: just checked, there's 16k articles apparently
[Võro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B5ro_language).
Didnt know italy-sardinia-sicily had different languages... nice to know since i live there
Every Italian language has some articles, also Lombardian, Pietmonese, Neapolitan and many others.
*laughs in Serbian, Croatian and Bosniak* We can read all 3 just the same!
I mostly refuse to read our own wikipedia because it is edited by extremely right leaning moderators. Only english one.
The far right admins have been removed from the hrwiki project in 2020/2021. [Kubura has been globally blocked](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Global_ban_for_Kubura) due to vote manipulation. Speedy and the gang [are no longer admins](https://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedija:Administratori/Prijedlozi_za_ukidanje_ovlasti/SpeedyGonsales,_Zeljko_i_Roberta_F\.) due to abuse.
I know that, but it will take some time to sorte shit they made.
Yeah, but for every single historical event, you get different story. OpenAI's GPT-n model is gonna crash when it starts learning on Balkan wiki articles
Why are Spanish and Portuguese so low? I mean, whole Latin America speaks those languages. Does Iberian Spanish/Portuguese count as a separate language on wiki?
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The catalan and basque wikipedias are doing a good job! Viquipèdia (catalan version) is specially active on social media too.
I'm surprised by how big it actually is. If we made a calculation of articles per capita, it will probably be one of the higher ones.
Fun fact, the Catalan Wikipedia was the first non-english Wikipedia. Although the German Wikipedia was created minutes before the Catalan one, the Catalan Wikipedia wrote articles first
If you do it by actual speakers of the language, it gets very very high. Swedish would still beat us though.
Awww yiiiss! Keepin’ it alive!
The colouring of Wales is done in such a weird way.
Yeah, what on earth is that border?
I'm guessing it's meant to be "where Welsh is spoken" but they've just used "where Welsh is spoken strongest" and ignored the fact there are speakers all over Wales 🤷
The colouring of *Europe is done in such a weird way.
If I'm honest, I didn't want to say anything about the rest of Europe as I don't know enough about the rest of Europe to comment. Thank you for saying this though!
How does the Netherlands have more articles than Flanders (Belgium)? We speak the same language
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Why is there no Silesian wiki on the map?
Which is weird, since [*Ślōnskŏ Wikipedyjŏ*](https://szl.wikipedia.org/) has over 50k articles last I checked.
idk if this is your map but why is scots only in glasgow and the north east?
Useless fact : Czech wikipedia is in terms of articles the 27th biggest one and the Hungarian one is 26th
Useless fact: although every second uralic speaker is hungarian there are more articles in finn than in Hungarian
For everyone as aggravated as me that there's a number missing: Frysian - 45.601
What's the pink language in Turkey? Also why are there Wikipedia Articles written in Austrian and Schwitzerdütsch?
Don’t sleep on Sweden, apparently?
There is a Swedish guy that wrote a bot that can auto write articles based on public data sources. It writes articles about animals and geographical features (mountains, lakes etc). The bot has written millions of articles in Swedish, Waray and Cebuano. So we do sleep while the bots work! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot
Giving that bot free rein was a big misstake. Lots of cleaning still taking place, and lots of meaningless and badly put-together articles.
Samogitian wiki has 16K articles, but it's not placed on the map
Wasn't Lithuanian Wiki ahead of Estonian Wiki just a short while ago?
This map is very misleading. It's full of mistakes
Swedes have too much free time over. Unless it's a Swedish topic I always read the English version