How many people visit Wikipedia each month in Esperanto / Ido / Interlingua / Turkish and so on?

General Winfield Scott Hancock was pleasantly surprised with a large number of visitors to his page in early July 2008

There's a nice tool here that has only been available over the past few months that lets you know how many hits a page has received. A year ago and more it was anyone's guess as to how many hits a page was receiving, which was too bad because I was really curious how many hits the article on Ido got when it was on the Main Page on December 25 2005, as well as the three days after when it remained as a small link on the Main Page as well.

Now though we can see exactly how many hits a single article is getting. Here's a good example: Operation Strangle, a page about an operation in World War II. It was on the Main Page in the did you know...? section for a few hours. What happened to the traffic? Take a look here:

It went from somewhere under 10 hits a day to 7200 in one day, then 3100, then 63, and then back down.

Okay, what about the featured article for the day? Let's go with the one on Winfield Scott Hancock (which by the way was on the Main Page the same day the movie Hancock with Will Smith was released). Here's how the stats have worked this month:

812 the day before, 39600 hits on the day, 5800 the next day, 2700 the day after that, then 2200, then 550, and after that in the 200s and low 300s.

So that's what you can expect if you're trying to draw attention to your language like I am with Interlingua (and consequently with other IALs I hope).

So how much traffic do the Wikipedias in other languages get? Let's look at May and June, and we'll start with Esperanto:

• Esperanto: 96,160 in May, 157,742 June

Is that good or bad? We'll have to look at some others to compare. Next up is Ido:

• Ido: 20,317 in May, 24,571 in June
  

What about Interlingua? Unfortunately the tool is only for languages with 10,000 articles and over so Interlingua doesn't make the cut. Volapük does though thanks to all its bot-translated articles:

• Volapük: 55,186 in May, 53,226 in June
  

So I suppose there is a benefit to pumping up your article count and getting up on the list. A higher view count doesn't necessarily translate into an active community, however.

How about Latin? That's kind of like an IAL now in the 21st century.

• Latin: 108,941 in May, 145,008 in June
  

Hmm, around the same traffic as Esperanto.

These are all languages without their own countries though, so we'll need to look at some natural languages with their own countries to make a good comparison. Latvian has around the same number of articles as Ido, so let's look at their numbers:

• Latvian: 132,490 in May, 131,237 in June
  

A bit less than I had expected. I was thinking somewhere around twice that of Esperanto and Latin. Next we'll take a look at Czech, which has a similar article count to Esperanto:

• Czech: 2,283,939 in May, 2,736,596 in June
  

That's the kind of traffic a mid-sized language will get. Just for fun, let's look at Turkish:

• Turkish: 3,371,746 in May, 3,335,182 in June
  

That's about what I expected. Now it's time to compare them to English, the reigning champ and the language that each IAL eventually intends to fell. How much does English get?

• English: 287,109,620 in May, 481,086,716 in June
  

Ouch. You can't beat hundreds of millions of hits. Even Spanish is way down there in comparison:

• Spanish: 29,099,735 in May, 43,649,950 in June

The moral of the story? All IALs remain gnats, unfortunately.