Friedel en ander frappanthede

I noticed recently that Wikipedia in Swahili has more articles than Wikipedia in Afrikaans. The difference is already around 9%. I hope and believe that most people know that the article count at Wikipedia doesn't say everything about the relevant encyclopaedia, but it remains an interesting toy, and it is interesting to see how things develop among the African languages.

I have been keeping an eye on the Wikipedia project for some time. It remains a wonderful demonstration of the power of a strong community. It is also a way for a number of minority languages to create a useful web resource, and for many languages, perhaps even their first encyclopaedia. The Afrikaans version of Wikipedia was the largest in terms of article count for a long while, but now Swahili is ahead. It must have happened in the last few months. Congratulations to all the contributors to the Swahili version!

Tables with interesting summaries of the statistics are available for Afrikaans and Swahili. (You might want to compare with the English version to understand the table.) Of course it is important to note that the two languages differ quite a bit in other aspects of growth and size. Another interesting page for the purpose of comparison is the list of all Wikipedias. More detail about article sizes is also available for Afrikaans and Swahili. If I look at this, I would like to believe that the Afrikaans Wikipedia still has an edge in a few areas, especially in terms of article size and shear amount of text. However, it does seem as if the Afrikaans version's growth isn't really accelerating.

Luckily this is not a competition with losers, and I'm very happy for good progress in any African language.