Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia articles written in the greatest number of languages

Lots of work necessary

I think this is an important component of Wikipedia statistics, but the page obviously needs a lot of development. The goal is to determine the top 50 or 100 articles by multi-lingual representation across all the Wikipedia sites, i.e. the articles covered by the most Wikipedias. This would require an automated program that could evaluate the number of languages each Wikipedia article is available in. Ideally, it would evaluate every article in every Wikipedia, since (although it's improbable) an article not covered in the English Wikipedia is covered in a vast number of other Wikipedias. As of now, the page just shows a sample of articles that were chosen because, hypothetically, they would be available in many different Wikipedia languages. The page counts were determined by copying and pasting an article's language bar into a Word document, then using Word Count to check the number of lines (i.e. the number of languages it is covered in). If you do this, make sure to add 1 to the total, as the language bar does not include the viewing language.

The title is also pretty clunky and is certainly subject to change. Thanks for your help. There are some great Wikipedia statistics pages, and I hope this can become one of them. KBurchfiel (talk) 01:22, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

And in the meantime, if you can think of an article that might rank among or atop this list, you're welcome to add it. KBurchfiel (talk) 01:25, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia namespace rather than article space?

Shouldn't this be in Wikipedia: namespace rather than article space? It is of mostly (granted, not entirely) internal interest, and, as it stands, is entirely WP:OR. LadyofShalott 01:27, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

You would know better than I would. Feel free to move it to namespace if it belongs there. I agree that it's internal interest and that it's original research, but hopefully the latter can change as the page develops. KBurchfiel (talk) 05:22, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

OK, I'll go ahead and move it then. If enough external sources can be found to establish notability as a regular article, the location question can be revisited at that point. LadyofShalott 00:18, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the move--I appreciate your help in finding the page a good home. :-) KBurchfiel (talk) 07:38, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Suggestion: Limit to +200 languages?

Unless the task is automated, it could be useful to set a higher treshold if we plan to make a somewhat complete list at any point. P G-A G (talk) 20:09, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

I wouldn't pick a single threshold. To be listed on 120 Wikipedias is very significant for a book, but not very significant for a chemical element. Even 240 Wikipedias isn't a lot for a country, although I think we ought to include all the countries anyway, just so people can see how they compare to each other. - Burner89751654 (talk) 18:35, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

What is with the amount of David Woodard articles??

Page gets a couple hundred views a day yet has 320 articles total, beating people like Michael Jackson and Jesus Christ himself. Is there a reason to this insane amount of translations? Because I'm curious. XanderK09 (talk) 21:32, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

I don't know. But someone on Reddit pointed out that a lot of the transclusions (looks like between 100 and 200, compared to 320 total) were all made by the same account, whose list of Wikipedias he's edited can be seen here: Special:CentralAuth/Swmmng. It's possible the same guy also created the other transclusions using different accounts. I assume that's David himself doing it for promotion, or a fan of his doing it as a tribute, or some guy doing it as a joke. And normally I'd say Wikipedia shouldn't be cluttered up with things like this. But I think we have enough room for one such article, which is worth keeping out of admiration for the effort and the ingenuity that went into it. - Burner89751654 (talk) 00:13, 31 August 2024 (UTC)