The Dutch Wikipedia (Dutch: Nederlandstalige Wikipedia) is the Dutch-language edition of the free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. It was started in June 2001. As of June 2015, the Dutch Wikipedia is the third-largest Wikipedia edition, with over 1,824,000 articles. It was the fourth Wikipedia edition to exceed 1 million articles, after the English, German and French editions.

History

The Dutch Wikipedia was started on 19 June 2001, and reached 100,000 articles on 14 October 2005. It briefly surpassed the Polish Wikipedia as the sixth-largest edition of Wikipedia, but then fell back to the eighth position. On 1 March 2006, it overtook the Swedish and Italian editions in one day to rise back to the sixth position. The edition's 500,000th article was created on 30 November 2008.[1] In a 2006 Multiscope research study, the Dutch Wikipedia was rated the third-best Dutch-language website, after Google and Gmail, with a score of 8.1.[2]

The Dutch language Wikipedia has the largest ratio of Wikipedia pages per native speaker of all of the top 10 largest Wikipedia editions. Its rate of daily article creations spiked in March 2006, rapidly growing to an average of 1,000 a day in early May 2006. After this number was reached, growth dropped to an average of only about 250 a day, comparable to the averages around December 2005. Since then, there have been more article-creation surges, one of the largest peaking at 2,000 new articles per day in September 2007, but the growth rate has always returned to the lowest average of around 250.

Internet bots

The majority of articles in Dutch Wikipedia (59%) were created by internet bots.[3] In October 2011, several bots created 80,000 articles (then equivalent to 10% of the entire edition's article count) in only 11 days.[4][5]

The Dutch Wikipedia's one-millionth article was created in December 2011, after another surge of bot activity saw 100,000 added articles in only 10 days. In late March 2013, the Dutch Wikipedia surpassed the French Wikipedia to become the third-largest edition of Wikipedia. In June 2013, it overtook the German Wikipedia to become the second-largest Wikipedia edition.

Article growth

Graph showing article growth of the Dutch Wikipedia between June 2001 and April 2014.
Date Number of articles[6] New articles per day (avg.)
06/19/2001 1 1
08/03/2003 10,000 13
02/07/2004 20,000 53
01/27/2005 50,000 125
10/14/2005 100,000 270
05/24/2006 200,000 625
12/26/2006 250,000 250
05/28/2007 300,000 250
01/17/2008 400,000 435
11/30/2008 500,000 344
04/30/2010 600,000 167
06/19/2011 700,000 625
09/18/2011 750,000 175
10/22/2011 800,000 10,000
12/07/2011 900,000 10,000
12/17/2011 1,000,000 10,000
09/14/2012 1,100,000 3,333
03/09/2013 1,200,000 10,000
03/18/2013 1,250,000 3,333
03/22/2013 1,300,000 10,000
04/01/2013 1,400,000 10,000
04/12/2013 1,500,000 10,000
06/14/2013 1,600,000 10,000
10/14/2013 1,700,000 127

Quality

Article depth

The depth or editing depth of Wikipedia is a rough indicator of the encyclopedia's collaborative quality, showing how frequently its articles are updated.[7] The depth is measured by taking the average number of edits per article multiplied by the extent in which articles are supported by discussion (among other things, talk pages). Among the nine language editions with one million articles, the Dutch, Swedish, and Polish Wikipedias in that order have depth parameters much lower than the other six.[8] As of March 2012, for the English version the article depth is 666, for the German 88, for the French 153, for the Spanish 160, for the Dutch only 18.[9]

Bytes per article

Compared to most other Wikipedia editions with a similar number of articles, articles on the Dutch Wikipedia have less content with an average of 1,598 bytes per article (as of February 2014). This is roughly 40% of that of the French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish editions (3,986-4,277 bytes/article as of February 2014).[10]

Bibliography

References

  1. ^ 500.000e artikel (in Dutch). Retrieved 7 December 2008.
  2. ^ "Nederlandse Wikipedia groeit als kool" (in Dutch). Multiscope.nl. Retrieved 27 December 2006.
  3. ^ Wikipedia Statistics
  4. ^ List of Wikipedias on 20 October 2011 (archived). Wikimedia. Retrieved 24 June 2013.
  5. ^ List of Wikipedias on 31 October 2011 (archived). Wikimedia. Retrieved 24 June 2013.
  6. ^ "Statistics of the Dutch Wikipedia" (in Dutch). Nl.wikipedia.org. Retrieved 18 June 2013.
  7. ^ Wikipedia article depth; Wikimedia
  8. ^ "List of Wikipedias". Wikimedia. Retrieved 19 January 2014. 
  9. ^ Find out more-Wikipedia; Utrecht University Library
  10. ^ Wikimedia Statistics, Wikipedia statistics, bytes per article. Retrieved 18 February 2015

External links

List of Wikipedias by article count
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