Wasting Time

One of the lovely things about the interwebs is stumbling across a website that is informative or interesting, but inherently useless. One of my favourites among these fascinating but pointless sites is listverse, a website that specialises in providing “Top Ten” lists of the most gruesome murders, hidden secrets of Egyptian Pharaohs, things you didn’t know about the fast food industry and so on.

The damn thing is a time sink, I just went over there to check some examples of lists and spent 20 minutes looking through “10 Mind-Blowing Things That Happened Last Month”. Number one on that list is that the town of Tisdale in Canada had to drop the town slogan that it had been using since 1958. The slogan, “Tisdale: the land of rape and honey” referred to the main products of the region, rapeseed being an older name for canola.

Even better than these sites though are the lesser known sites that are just as fascinating. A few years ago while compiling a quiz for a company offsite meeting, I came across this list of the most visited pages on wikipedia. It’s not the most user-friendly of sites, which makes it even more fun for me - kind of like discovering an exceptionally good restaurant in a little visited country town - but it provides some interesting insights.

Wikipedia is published by language, the version you mainly see is simply the English language version, with over 280 different languages for “active” wikipedias.

The English wikipedia is by far the largest, with over 30 million users looking at over five million articles. From second place down though, the question of which wikipedia is the ‘biggest’ is a vexed question indeed. You can consider the number of articles, the number of users, the number of edits and all sorts of other measures to come up with a judgement, but it’s unwise to depend on just one of these factors.

For example, measuring by number of articles, the second largest wikipedia is the Swedish language wiki and the third largest is the Cebuano language wikipedia. Cebuano is a language spoken by about 20 million people in the Philippines and I expect that there are a great many Cebuano speakers that spend far too much time on wikipedia.

Measuring by number of edits gives German second and French third, which seems a bit more sensible and measuring by number of active users gives German second and Spanish third.

Wikipedia has also helpfully determined a metric that they call “depth” which they consider a measure of article quality rather than overall bigness of the wiki in question. Measuring by this attribute, the highest quality wikipedia in the world is the one in Ripuarian, a German dialect spoken by a little under a million people in the Rhineland area. Coming in at fourth place is the Old Church Slavonic wikipedia which has only 10 active users. Old Church Slavonic is a dead language that was spoken from the 9th to the 11th Century (as if you didn't know!)

An interesting curiosity is the Hebrew wikipedia which has a relatively small number of articles (less than 200,000) but an enormous number of edits (almost 20,000,000). I’m going out on a limb here, but I suspect that these folks might actually enjoy having an argument.

To come back to my original topic, which was the most popular articles on the various wikipedias, if we start with the English version, we can see the following as the top ten;

Two of these entries struck me immediately; the list of Bollywood films coming in at fourth place and the entry on Chris Kyle coming in ninth place. Chris Kyle for those of you that don’t know is the real life American Sniper on whom the film is based.

Why the list of Bollywood films comes in at 4th on the list is anyone’s guess but might well say something about the increasing influence of our friends on the subcontinent (hello Satya, Dylan and Neeraj!). Anyone with a theory is encouraged to share it in the comments below.

The top ten list for foreign languages becomes interesting and I wonder whether the respective lists say something about speakers of that language? Once again, feel free to share your own theories.

To start with, most of the foreign language wikipedias feature an entry for the main country speaking that language and generally it’s pretty high up the list. The German wikipedia has Deutschland as number 2, French wiki has France as number 1, Japanese wiki has Japan as number 5 and so on. Portuguese wiki has Portugal as number 10, but has Brazil as number 2 and that probably makes sense for them, although the entry for Coca-Cola comes in at number 1 and I can’t help buy wonder what that says about the Portuguese (or perhaps the Brazilians).

The curiosities for me are the ones where a national country does not feature. The Chinese wikipedia for example has the entry for China coming in at number two and has the entry for Japan at number 10 on the list. At first place on the Chinese wiki is a Korean game show and at fourth place is a list of porn stars. Perhaps this says something about Chinese priorities. That Korean game show by the way, is also number 1 on the Vietnamese wikipedia.

The top three places on the Italian wikipedia are all taken up by television series, which definitely says something about Italy.

The Dutch wikipedia top ten makes for interesting reading with the top three entries being Amsterdam, The Netherlands and The Hague, just to demonstrate how self-obsessed the Dutch are. In sixth place on their list is Belgium, which I suspect our Dutch speakers will tell me demonstrates that they are interested in the rest of the world too. In fourth place on the Dutch wiki is the entry for “Paper Size”. As for what that tells you about our Dutch cousins, I have no idea.

And a handy tip for those of you planning to explore the wonderful world of foreign-language wikipedias for yourself; when you click on the link for the foreign language wiki, you will be taken through to the page in that language (of course). You can generally find the English language version by clicking on the link for English on the left hand side of the page as shown here;