Taberna on the Latin Wikipedia is now about 50% Latin

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

A bit over a year ago when the Latin Wikipedia was at 25 000 articles -- now it's over 38 000 -- I took a look at the Taberna (the discussion area) to see how much of the discussion between users was actually in Latin, or whether the majority simply used English. This is important to note as the more a language is actually used as a real language (and not just an academic exercise when writing articles) the more real it becomes to those who use it.

Eliminating the smallest categories (discussions in languages other than English and Latin, for example) the stats at the time were:

  • Threads all in English: 69
  • Mostly in English: 4
  • Half Latin, half English: 4
  • Mostly in Latin: 1
  • All in Latin: 17
For simplicity's sake we can turn this into three categories:
  • 50%+ English: 73
  • About 50/50: 4
  • 50%+ Latin: 18

Now it's 16 months later, and the current Taberna can be seen here. This time the article count is as follows:
  • Threads all in English: 41
  • Mostly in English: 5
  • Half Latin, half English: 11
  • Mostly in Latin: 1
  • All in Latin: 43
As three categories:
  • 50%+ English: 46
  • About 50-50: 11
  • 50%+ Latin: 44

So there has actually been a big change over the past year and a bit in the amount of Latin used between users.

Let's pie chart this. Grey = English, green = Latin, light blue = 50/50.

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