Talk:Europe/en

what about the 33%

It says "There are over 491 million speakers of the 21 national languages listed, comprising 67% of the population of Europe." what proportion of the other 33% are covered by other pedias, English, Spanish, French Portuguese and Turkish? More importantly how many people do we not have a pedia for and what languages do they speak?

We should also have an analysis of whether or not we are catering for people by first language and by any language. WereSpielChequers 20:02, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. Given that the only data we have about regional comes from comScore and comScore has placed Turkey in the middle east and north Africa, we have also put Turkey in the middle east and north Africa for the purpose of our analysis. As for data on English, Spanish, French and Portugues, I will be posting that data soon in a separate section devoted to "pan regional" or "global" Languages. As for the issue about first language speakers versus second language speakers it is a really important one that unfortunately, is very difficult to get data about. I have not seen any accurate figures for the number of English as a second language speakers in the world let alone broken down by country. If you have any suggestions as to reliable sources for this topic please send them over to me as I would be very interested. Sarah476 14:44, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

I would suggest that national censuses such as http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/article.asp?id=2176 will have information on either languages spoken or at least country of origin. The European Union would probably have some statistics available. To be honest I don't think it very important to know how many Spanish, English, German or French speakers there are as we will be catering for those languages. I think it more important that we have information for the languages where we may not currently have a viable wiki - vlach, Latvian, Ossetian, or the various Sami languages. I suspect there will be a long tail here, and potentially a key decision needs to be made as to whether we want to maximise the amount of information available to people in languages that they understand, or try to get at least something out in every language which has native speakers. WereSpielChequers 16:03, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Potential Users (Thousands)

I'm hoping that "Potential Users (Thousands)" is a typo and should be "Potential Users (millions)" but how is it derived? Who do we predict will be a non-user? Is it based on age, literacy or something else? WereSpielChequers 20:07, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks You are definitely right that it should be millions. That was a typo on my part. As for how it is derived as is noted in a footnote, the number is by determining the number of people who speak that language that are online. Sarah476 14:46, 9 October 2009 (UTC)