Open thread: Why is the Norwegian Wikipedia so much larger than the one in Danish?

Monday, September 01, 2008


Something I've wondered about for a while, and perhaps I'll just ask the question and see if someone has the answer.

Take a look at the following for the three countries of Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and their official languages compared to their Wikipedia sizes:


Sweden/Swedish Norway/NorwegianDenmark/Danish
Population 9.2 million
4.8 million
5.5 million
HDI
(Human Development Index)
0.956 0.9680.943
Total GDP
$455 billion
$376 billion
$311 billion
Wikipedia stats



# of articles
290,605
179,002 (+39,918 Nynorsk)
93,246
# of edits
7.3 million
4.4 million
(+ over 700,000 Nynorsk)
2.5 million

Swedish and Norwegian make sense: Sweden has more people, ergo a larger Wikipedia. Danish though is less than half the size of Swedish, and barely over half the size of Norwegian (less than half including Nynorsk).

I'm sure the answer's somewhere within their respective Wikipedias but I suspect it might be faster to just ask this way.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, English is spoken as a second language throughout the whole Scandinavian reason, but perhaps particularly so in Denmark, making the creation and maintenance of a Danish Wikipedia that much closer to redundant.

Anonymous said...

That and I suppose the Danes can just read the Norwegian or Swedish wikias when they need something Scandinavia-centric.

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