Monthly Wikipedia user geostatistics
The Wikimedia Foundation publishes every month some very interesting statistics on the Data lake, counting the number of active Wikipedians per country.
We have now census data available for each combination of country and language.[1] We calculated a Dutch-Belgium score, as a practical exercise.
Criteria:
- Minimum 5 edits per month, including anonymous edits (about 20%)
- Some countries are not reported for geopolitical reasons
- Keep in mind that the number should be interpreted as "at least". The number could be 10 times higher than reality, in extreme cases (WMF does not want to give out absolute numbers because of privacy -> if there is only 1 participant for example, this can be sensitive information for certain country/language combinations).
| Wikipedia | België | Nederland | Totaal | Percent BE | Percent NL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| dewiki | 21 | 51 | 72 | 29% | 71% |
| enwiki | 231 | 621 | 852 | 27% | 73% |
| frwiki | 341 | 61 | 402 | 85% | 15% |
| itwiki | 11 | 11 | 22 | 50% | 50% |
| nlwiki | 501 | 1381 | 1882 | 27% | 73% |
| Totaal | 1105 | 2125 | 3230 | 34% | 66% |
A few observations:
- The Belgian fraction for German, English and Dutch is approximately 27-29%.
- The Dutch fraction for French is only 15%.
- The Italian Wikipedia is equally used in Belgium and Nederland.
We now know that on the Dutch Wikipedia we have about 500 Belgians and 1400 Dutch people.
The raw monthly aggregated figures are available since January 2018.