This informal study, posted last year, divides the number of Wikipedia articles in a given language by the total language-speaker population, and voilà—a chart showing which languages are, per head, the most prolific Wikipedia writers:

(The first column is productivity ranking, the second is gross number of articles, the third is the name of the language. See the whole chart, with all 50 languages here.)

Prod | Article | Language

1 | 48 | Icelandic
2 | 15 | Esperanto
3 | 41 | Basque
4 | 31 | Estonian
5 | 9 | Swedish
6 | 14 | Norwegian
7 | 27 | Slovenian
8 | 13 | Finnish
9 | 6 | Dutch
10 | 16 | Slovak
11 | 28 | Lithuanian
12 | 18 | Danish
13 | 19 | Hebrew
14 | 4 | Polish
15 | 20 | Catalan
16 | 42 | Ido*
17 | 35 | Galician
18 | 3 | French
19 | 2 | German
20 | 17 | Czech
21 | 32 | Croatian
22 | 36 | Norwegian (Nynorsk)
23 | 29 | Bulgarian
24 | 7 | Italian
25 | 26 | Serbian
26 | 22 | Hungarian
27 | 44 | Georgian
28 | 1 | English
29 | 50 | Bosnian
30 | 5 | Japanese

Other ways Catalonia is whupping the United States: they’ve got less breast cancer and just beat England to take the number five slot in the International Korfball Federation!

And 10 out of 10 Americans don’t even know what the fuck korfball is!

We’re doomed!

(*What is Ido, you ask? Nü-Esperanto! DOOOOOOM!)

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

17 replies on “Catalan speakers the world’s 15th-most productive Wikipedists, English speakers the 28th. Also: Korfball.”

  1. Well, that pretty much explains why the Icelandic economy collapsed. Estonian and Swedish economists would be sweating bullets right now, if they weren’t too busy writing Wikipedia articles.

  2. Polish 4th in total entries? Dutch 5th, ahead of Spanish? That’s way more impressive.

    Thanks for the Catalan propaganda though. Yes, we know Spain would never have won the 2008 European soccer championships nor made it to the finals of men’s Olympic basketball tournament without the genius of their Catalan players, and Picasso never would’ve become a great artist if he hadn’t lived in Barcelona, blah blah blah.

    In the per head count, Catalans are behind the Basques—2nd best in northern Spain. Must take some doing.

  3. Catalans are undoubtedly in the top three (along with Basques and Galicians) in *not ever returning with your order* if you are native Spanish with Madrilian accent.

  4. Abby — I believe so. Those three places were the places where the guy with the gringo madrilian accent had to roll the r’s for the team.

  5. Bitch, please. 1 guy –> 48 articles? All I need is a weekend and a couple of books, and I could make Sindarin the most productive language on Wikipedia.

  6. Do not forget that catalan Wikipedia was the only non english wikipedia with articles for over two months, and that was in March 2001!
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_Wik…

    Here is a message from Jimmy Walles showing interest in creating wikipedias in other languages, with special mention to Catalan:
    http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wik…

    Here you can see the evolution of the different wikipedias at the very beginning:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:M…)

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