Odia Wikipedia progress from July to December, 2015
Odia Wikipedia, one of the very active Wikipedias in Indian languages has been showing a negative rate of growth for the last 6 months. We will try to analyse, what has been happening and how can that be improved.
Odia language is one of the 22 languages recognized by Indian union in 8th schedule. It has 31 million population as per 2001 census. Odia language has its own Wikipedia created on 3rd June 2002. This blog post will try to put out Odia Wikipedia's growth from a perspective based on Wikimedia stats.
Odia Wikipedia started on 3rd June 2002 and for almost 4 years, it survived with only one page in the project. Until an IP edit created the home page mimicking Sanskrit Wikipedia's homepage. This continued for over a year and then from an IP address, a word to word translation of home page was made into Odia. Around the same time, an entry for an article - (ଭାରତ)India was created. The homepage of Odia Wikipedia and other articles continued to be edited by IP address users until ଓଡ଼ିଆ created his/her account and started modifying the homepage.
Today, Odia Wikipdia has 10,187 articles in article namespace, 47,291 pages in all (including article namespace pages); 10,574 registered users which includes bots. Of these registered users, as of November 2015, 63 users have done at least one edit in November, 13 is the number of users flagged as bots. There are 4 administrators on Odia Wikipedia.
When we look at the stats table of Odia Wikipedia taken from stats.wikimedia.org, below,
| Total Editors | New Editors | Active Editors | Very Active Ediors | Articles | New Articles per day | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| July, 2015 | 127 | 2 | 12 | 2 | 8,800 |
1 |
| August, 2015 | 129 | 2 | 15 | 6 | 8,900 |
3 |
| September, 2015 | 131 | 2 | 15 | 6 | 9,100 |
5 |
| October, 2015 | 136 | 5 | 21 | 4 | 10,100 |
36 |
| November, 2015 | 136 | 11 | 2 | 10,500 |
2 |
Some of the direct observations are : Over a 5 month period, only 9 people joined Odia Wikipedia, average Indian count for this is 9 per month.
The active editors count, which is about 20% of Total editors is at 10% or less for most of the months.
The very active editors count, again 40-50% of active editors is still low.
There have been no new editors who have come to Odia Wikipedia and registered for the month of November.
Though the articles per day count has been at rise, we need to analyze what kind of content it is and what is the size of articles being added.
| Bytes added | Files/ images added | |
| July 2015 | 6656008 | 0 |
| August 2015 | 28507493 | 0 |
| September 2015 | 12403456 | 0 |
| October 2015 | 25281989 | 1 |
| November 2015 | 5442630 | 0 |
| December | 8492735 | 4 |
The above table shows the overall bytes added to Odia Wikipedia (both added and removed) and he files uploaded.
The bytes added is generally an indicative of how much content is being added to the project. If an average good article has, say 10kb length on Odia Wikipedia, then what th above table interprets is that a good amount of content is added to Odia Wikipedia for thee months of August, and October, but same thing did not happen in July, September, October and December.
The files/images added to the project is not a direct indicative of any quality change on the wiki. As all file uploads happen on commons. But this is of course and indicative of non-free fair use images being added, and if that is the usability, then Odia Wikipedians do not seem to be utilizing it properly or Odia Wikipedia has content that does not depend on such images.
