2014/02/28

The Catalan version of Wikipedia breaks records

Viquipèdia, the Catalan version of Wikipedia, has broken its record number of visits for the second month in a row. In the newspaper Periódico de Catalunya Ignasi Fortuny gives the data collected by Amical Wikimedia. “In September, 33,7 million pages were visited, and the figure went up to 45,9 million visits in October”.


What’s more, in Global Voices Violeta Camarasa tells us how, in the “Open Science” congress that took place at Vrije Universiteit Brussel on October 24th 2013, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales quoted Viquipèdia as an example of success. If you want to see it on YouTube, here’s the moment when he praises Viquipèdia’s efforts.








On the site his words are transcribed by Viquipèdia editor Arnau Duran:


“…in some of our small language Wikipedias we have very active communities, and there’s maybe only a few people there, but they are very passionate about their mother tongue and they really want to do the work and so they work really hard. If we have a look at some of the larger minor languages of Europe, like Catalan is a good example... Catalan Wikipedia is far larger than you would have guessed from the number of people who are speaking Catalan. And it is because the Catalan people are quite passionate about their language, which has been historically under threat.”


From Estudis d’Arts i Humanitats and the Càtedra de Multilingüisme we would like to congratulate everyone who works for Viquipèdia, almost the oldest Wikipedia in the world, to keep its present incredibly high quality and coverage, with more than 400.000 articles!


But now we must get people to use it more and more, since some critics point out that journalists working for Catalan media tend to use versions in other languages rather than the Catalan one.


According to Wikimedia Catalan is the 85th language in the world in number of speakers, but it goes up to number 37 if we look at the relative number of editors per speaker, and even higher –to number 17 in the world– in number of articles. It goes back down to world’s 30th in visits per hour. And this last figure is the one we all must work to improve. We hope the links in this article will help.

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