Odia Wikipedia is the first Wikipedia of Indic languages, created long back on 3rd June 2002. Now it has more than14,500 articles. There had not been many activities until the end of 2005. After that the community became active. As we are at the initial days of 2019, here is a statistics of what happened till now.
Note:
- From here onwards in this article, Wikipedia refers to *Odia Wikipedia
- *All data except the page view data are until December 2018. Pageviews data are till 9th January 2019.
Editors
In between 2011 and 2012, there has been a drastic rise in editors in Wikipedia, in terms of data 71% rise (from 220 to 761)in registered users and 51.9% rise (from 401 to 835) in Anonymous editors.
Over the years number of Odia Wikipedia editors
Edits
There have been 1,78,834 edits by registered users and 17,536 edits by anonymous users.
Anonymous edits per anonymous users throughout the years
Registered users edits per user throughout the years
As in the second chart for unique registered you can see, the edits (which in orange color) are quite high compared to the number of users. To have a clear number refer to the below chart.
Number of edits per user throughout the years
We have seen in the first chart that the number of editors is decreasing. However, as we looked at the above chart whoever existing enthusiastic editors still present, the number of edits per year for those editors are more and increasing year by year. On an average in 2018 every registered editor has edited 33 times, which is 38% more than in 2017. On the other hand, the anonymous users' edits remain constant from 1 to 2 edits throughout the years.
Number of edits per year by a user (1 to 4 edits per year users discarded)
The above chart shows an interesting aspect of the number of edits by users in a year. 2012 shows a promising year where there was an increase in users with all number of edits. 2018 looks promising as there was a decrease in 5 to 25 and 25 to 99 edits users, however, increase in 100 to more edits users. That suggests 112 users have edited more than 100 times in 2018 which is 47% higher than in 2017.
Throughout the age of Wikipedia, it has been seen that not a single new page has been created by an Anonymous user if created might have been deleted due to poor quality.
Creation of content and non-content pages over the years
Content: For pages belonging in content namespaces, which is also referred to as articles, and for most wikis includes pages in namespace 0 only. Non Content: For pages in namespaces not considered content (talk pages, user pages etc).
As seen from the chart there was a drastic increase in non-content pages in 2011. In 2018 there were slightly more Non-content pages.
Pageviews
Readers’ devices trend over the years
Wikipedia visit from numbers of unique devices
These pie charts show one important trend among Wikipedia readers. The desktop viewers have been reduced from 84% in 2015 to 62% in 2018.
On the other hand with the rise of smartphones, mobile web viewership has been increased from 16% in 2015 to 36% in 2018.
Lastly, Wikipedia mobile application viewership also gaining some usage. However, it has a long way to go.
Though Desktop readers are still more than 50%. Based on previous years progression there is a high chance that in 2019 we may witness more than 50% of readers coming from mobile apps and browsers. The editors should take note of this.
In addition to this, there have been more unique visitors from the mobile web than desktop. The line is already crossed in the initial months of 2018. It suggests that desktop readers are frequent readers compared to mobile holders.
Other than India, there are viewers from USA, France, China, Germany, Canada etc in descending order of the number of views for December 2018.
Page views over the last few years
There has been a slow yet consistent increase in viewership of Odia Wikipedia.
Conclusion
Over the last couple of years, the number of active editors in Odia Wikipedia is consistently decreasing, which is not a good sign for a language spoken by more than 3 crores (31 million) people. As of today, there are only 60 active editors.
Around 100 loyal editors have edited more than 100 times last year. Those handful of volunteers are maintaining Wikipedia. Hats off to them.
There is a rise in mobile viewership. The editors need to write articles mobile-friendly to help more readers.
Odia has been referred not only from Odisha or India but also from all over the world.