The languages of Wikipedia articles – obstacles to access and cultural diversity

A new article summarises the prominence of languages on Wikipedia. English tops the index, with more than 5 million Wikipedia articles, followed by Swedish, Cebuano, German, Dutch, French and Russian. On the other hand, Arabic Wikipedia has just 400.000 articles; ‘a language spoken by more than 400 million people is less represented than Swedish, a language spoken by just 9 million.’ The article also addresses languages as an obstacle to Internet access, as well as the negative impact of language homogenisation on cultural diversity.