Research:Developed and emerging Wikipedias
Developed and emerging Wikipedias is a classification developed in 2024 by the Movement Insights team for use in the Foundation's essential metrics.
List
editThese 8 Wikipedias are considered "developed":
- Chinese Wikipedia
- English Wikipedia
- French Wikipedia
- German Wikipedia
- Italian Wikipedia
- Japanese Wikipedia
- Russian Wikipedia
- Spanish Wikipedia
All other Wikipedias are considered "emerging".
Background
editIn 2024, we (the Movement Insights team) needed an initial, relatively stable partition of the most developed vs developing Wikipedias to form part of a suite of new essential metrics known as the "contributor pipeline". In particularly, we wanted something that would make it easier to focus on the growth of quality and diverse content in developing Wikipedia language communities.
We examined the highest-ranked Wikipedias looking at consistent rankings for the past three years based on several key monthly metrics available in the wiki comparison dataset: active editors, active administrators, pageviews, and content pages, as well as their annual "overall size rank" (a composite of monthly active editors and monthly unique devices). Across all the engagement metrics, there were 8 Wikipedias which consistently appeared among the top 10 and also appeared in the top 15 Wikipedias by the content pages. We selected these as our "developed Wikipedias".
We will use this list as a starting point and check-in at six-month intervals to monitor the stability of the rankings we used and assess the utility of the classification.