נושא בדף שיחת משתמש:Amire80/גנזך זרימה

Hello. I am a user from Greek Wikipedia ( you may remember me from a 2018 article that you authored on the use of the content translator in Wikipedia). I have a question about Hebrew Wikipedia, which is certainly how you have managed to keep this abnormally high number of active users in comparison with the just 6 L1 million speakers of your language. In other words, how Hebrew manages to have a very high degree of activity in comparison with the number of speakers. I really admire how you have kept a so high degree of activity in comparison with the amount of native speakers of Hebrew.

I wish I knew :)

Don't trust anyone who tells you anything else.

Thank you for your answer. I think that this is related with the strong affiliation that Jews have with education; I interpret it as a result of this. This numbers are really impressive, because if you subtract the very, very young children, newcomers from other countries that know little Hebrew and integrate into Israel, and the fraction of Haredis that avoids the secular internet that number goes below 5 million.

OK, sorry, couldn't resist writing this long thing, which has been brewing in my head for years...

So... the Jews' "affiliation" with education, whatever "affiliation" even means, may be an explanation, but it's only a hypothesis, and it's very generalized. It needs proper proof with sociological methods and comparison to people who speak other languages. If anybody runs such research, I'd be curious to read it, but until anybody does, it's just a hypothesis, and I don't want to use it as an actual explanation.

There are a few other cultural and organizational things I can think of, which probably influence the Hebrew Wikipedia's activity. They are relatively more solid than general "affiliation with education", but all of them are nevertheless based on my intuition and not on research and calculation, so be super-careful when using them for anything.

The first thing will sound obvious and transparent, but it is actually substantial: a lot of Israelis expect to search the web in Hebrew and to find a useful result at least in some cases. I don't have a number, but if I had to guess, I'd say it's well over 70% of the population (and I mean all Israelis, including speakers of Arabic, Russian, French, and other languages). It may be similar for most European languages, but I don't have statistics. I mean, it's certainly around 100% for speakers of English, French, German, and Spanish, but I don't know the numbers for Greek, Albanian, or Latvian, for example.

Again, I'll emphasize that I don't know the number for Hebrew either, but it's probably high-ish. And I am sure that these numbers are very low for pretty much all languages of Africa (except Arabic and maybe Swahili, Afrikaans, and Somali), and for most languages of Asia, except Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Thai, and maybe Hindi, Thai, Burmese, and Malayalam. This, in part, happens thanks to the relatively high amount of useful content in the Hebrew Wikipedia, but it's not only that; there were successful Hebrew-language websites before 2003, when the Wikipedia began. Examples are Ynet, Globes, Tapuz, and others. And Hebrew was used online even before the world wide web, using BBS and other technologies. So the Hebrew Wikipedia didn't appear in an online vacuum. And if we go even earlier in history, modern elementary schooling in Hebrew has existed since the 1880s, and education pushes people to expect to use Hebrew for most things, rather than some foreign language. (I'm not mentioning traditional Jewish religious schooling in Hebrew. It has existed for millennia, and it certainly helped with establishing modern secular schooling, but by itself, it has rather different purposes.)

Why did people in a small country, with a relatively high percent of people who can read English (around 30% report that they now English well, and 30% report knowing "some English"), and with a technically challenging alphabet (right to left...) bother to use computers in their language? I don't exactly know. But this brings me to the second point:

Tech education and industry are relatively well-developed. The military has used computers since at least 1959, and quite a lot of Israelis learn advanced computer usage there, and later use these skills in their careers. Also, the military required the use of Hebrew in its equipment, so technology for that had to be developed early. Commercial electronics and software companies, which developed original technology, have existed at least since the early 1960s (Chromagen and Elbit are famous examples, and there are many others). Math, chemistry, engineering, and physics higher education has existed since 1912, and a lot of people insisted on learning it in Hebrew and not in German, English, or other languages; see War of the Languages (although, to be honest, there's a certain shift to English in higher education in recent years). Now, since at least some understanding of technical and educational things, such as markup languages and citation rules, are important for Wikipedia editing, this certainly helped. If anyone can measure these things systematically and compare these metrics to the situation in other countries and languages, it would be very interesting.

One last thing I should mention is that precisely because the country is so small, it is relatively easy to organize physical-space meetups of Wikipedians. I'll give the Russian Wikipedia as an extreme opposite example: its editing community is huge, but the attendance at its annual conference is very small, with fewer than 50 people. I find it really strange: these meetups take place mostly in Moscow, which has more people than all of Israel, or in Saint Petersburg, which is almost as large, but because they are perceived as meetups of all Russian Wikipedians, people from other cities rarely come there, as it's far away and expensive. In Israel, there are usually two meetups a year, they are perceived as countrywide, and coming there is easy by bus, train, or car. They are usually attended by about 100 people or more. Intuitively, successful physical-space meetups probably contribute something to community development and activity, although again, I'm not entirely sure. Most European countries are between Israel and Russia by their size, and I'm curious how does this work there, and how does this correlate with the activity.

(Comment: I keep comparing Israel to European countries because they are probably the most relevant comparison by population size and also by culture. For example, it's well documented that Hebrew language activists in the late 19th century drew inspiration from language revitalization movements in Eastern Europe of the same period, for example from Czech, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian. America and Australia have just four major languages, all of which originate from Europe. India, China, Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, and Burma have active Wikipedian communities, but they are probably different culturally, and I'm less familiar with them; there may be some relevant things to compare, but it's difficult for me to pinpoint them. African Wikipedians mostly edit in English, French, and Arabic, and with the exception of Afrikaans and maybe Swahili, the communities in Africa's own languages are only beginning to emerge.)

In the very end, I need to respond to your comment about "subtraction":

• You don't need to subtract the newcomers who learn Hebrew as a second language. They do read and write the Hebrew Wikipedia. In a way I am one myself; I started editing the Hebrew Wikipedia fourteen years after I started learning Hebrew, so maybe I was not exactly a "newcomer", but it's definitely not my first language. And there are some editors who started editing after learning Hebrew for much less than fourteen years. Most importantly, people who live even for a short time in Israel need to learn to at least read Hebrew, and reading Wikipedia is the most important first step to editing Wikipedia.
• You don't need to subtract Haredim either. Some Haredim indeed avoid the secular Internet, but a lot of Haredim do use the web, and they do read and edit the usual Wikipedia. Some use voluntary censorship tools, like "Rimon", and this also creates occasional technical issues (e.g., they unintentionally break existing content while editing), and others just use regular reading and editing. Many of them also have administrator rights, come to meetups, etc. So no, don't subtract them. Certainly not all of them.

I hope this helps. And I have to emphasize yet again: practically everything I wrote here is based on intuition, so use it super-carefully, and feel free to mistrust it completely. And if you know sociologists, sociolinguists, and historians, give them these topics as research ideas ;)

Thank you for your very analytical answer, and for the time you dedicated for this. It is a really long text, and I spent some minutes reading it (it took more than hour to answer). I had used the " education" hypothesis based in the high educational standards that Israelis and Jews are having (an empirical observation).

In Greece this percentage seems to be lower, because, as much like Israelis, most of us (especially young ones) tend to know very good English, but taking WP as an example, we have fewer articles and English is the most popular Wikipedia for some months every year (mostly in the summer).

I don't need an answer for the number, and your own explanation for the high activity of Hebrew is really enlightening, together with the additional text. For the named languages, I would add Hausa and Igbo (they are gradually forming a stable community, although with varying activity) but I would remove Burmese and Malayalam because of the presence that English has there and a really strict censorship that existed in Myanmar especially before a moderate democratisation that ended with the coup in 2021. Regarding the internet there were already Greek-language news websites such as Kathimerini, Vima and many more operating from the late nineties, however they promoted Wikipedia later (around 2006-07) and Livepedia stifled significantly our prospects, thus also giving me an explanation why there is such a high amount of users in Hebrew, but fewer in Greek despite that we have nearly the double number of speakers of Hebrew. Media don't speak very often about Wikipedia (they mostly republish the annual pageviews summary of el.wikipedia, articles translated from international sources, or speak about vandalisms that take place in it, for example a vandalism in the page of a TV host).

In Greece, the military began to develop its use of computers later (the government began to routinely use computers from around 1963, although IBM operated there from 1939). We also have good programmers and people trained in informatics, together with high quality universities, as in Israel, however in contrast with Israel, software companies of Greece have a much fewer presence globally, and in many cases we mostly export IT professionals abroad (especially during the crisis), although now there is attempt to bring foreign companies to make hubs in Greece. Greece mostly lacked the vision, a desire from the government and other flaws, such as rampant corruption, that kept it so behind. As you spoke about language teaching in Israel, in Greece the Modern Greek that we speak today are language of education since 1976, and previously was an artificial standard language named Katharevousa, made to resemble Ancient Greek (see language issue in Greece(.

I strongly agree with your observation about the meetings; as most Israelis live in the area between Gush Dan, Jerusalem and Haifa, it is easy to organise meetings and coordinate various projects to promote Hebrew Wikipedia, as well to solidify the community. However, many of us live in Athens, some in Thessaloniki, some in other areas of the country, we rarely conduct meetings and everything since 2020 (after a seven year hiatus). Generally, the Greek Wikipedia's community is stable with periods of growth and decrease over the years. We try to collaborate, but they are frequent quarrels between the community for various topics (policy, articles, contributions of certain users) and other such. Except for the quarrels that exist between a part of the users, in other cases the climate is mostly peaceful. But as often Greeks tend to disagree in some matters (this is an empirical observation, but it is noted from many there), this is also the case some times in Wikipedia. Just use the machine translator in the page el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Βικιπαίδεια:Σημειωματάριο διαχειριστών and you will understand. But we try to collaborate, we make some really succesful collaborations, and we acknowledge the problems of the community but we are far from solving them. Also since 2017 the number of active users has grew by approximately one fourth (we have approximately 9,000 users making one edit in a year from 6,400 in 2017, but few growth in the stable users). We have few articles, but if you check the lists, you will see that we fare better in terms of quality, although suffering from serious problems  ? in documentation. Anyway, based in your own observation, what's the climate in HebrewIs the size of the community growing over the time or remains stable?

I understand, for comparison Modern Greek activists building the modern Greek nation used both Katharevousa and Demotic (Modern Greek of today) language, living in a region spanning from Ionian isles to Asia Minor. Regarding the Asian countries, India and China have active communities, but poverty, lower education standards in comparison to the west , popularity of English and censorship respectively stifle the prospects for those communities, although India begins to grow again in size after the pandemic decreased the number of active users in most of the Indic Wikipedias after rapid growth through every year of the 2010s. Africa begins to build its own communities, not only in Afrikaans and Swahili, but also in Hausa, Igbo, Darja, even in Yoruba, with occassional spikes elsewhere.

About my " subtractions" : Thank you for enlightening me on this topic. My statement for newcomers is based in that they have grew with an other language, thus they mostly read their native language, but gradually integrate in Hebrew (I have seen many olim doing notable work there, and you also have done some really good work there, indeed, so there is really a falsehood from my own part there).

Regarding Haredim, I just assumed that a part avoids the secular internet, so that's why I mentioned the word "fraction", given the presence of Hamichlol, a (mostly) edited version of Hebrew Wikipedia.

I don't know any sociologists from Israel, however the activity on Hebrew Wikipedia can be really a good topic for the students of sociology in one of the universities of Israel. In of Greek Wikipedia, in 2016 (http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM16/paper/download/13192/12879( Cyprus, there was a research on the activity, although there https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%92%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE%B9%CF%80%CE%B1%CE%AF%CE%B4%CE%B5%CE%B9%CE%B1:%CE%91%CE%B3%CE%BF%CF%81%CE%AC/%CE%91%CF%81%CF%87%CE%B5%CE%AF%CE%BF_2016/%CE%9D%CE%BF%CE%AD%CE%BC%CE%B2%CF%81%CE%B9%CE%BF%CF%82#%CE%A0%CF%81%CF%8C%CE%B2%CE%BB%CE%B7%CE%BC%CE%B1_%CE%BC%CE%B5_%CE%AD%CF%81%CE%B5%CF%85%CE%BD%CE%B1_%CF%84%CE%BF%CF%85_%CE%B1%CE%BD%CE%BF%CE%B9%CE%BA%CF%84%CE%BF%CF%8D_%CE%A0%CE%B1%CE%BD%CE%B5%CF%80%CE%B9%CF%83%CF%84%CE%B7%CE%BC%CE%AF%CE%BF%CF%85_%CE%9A%CF%8D%CF%80%CF%81%CE%BF%CF%85 you can observe that the community disputes its results.

Thank you again, this was very helpful in order to understand some possible reasons for the abnormally high, when compared to other European Wikipedias, activity and number of active users of Hebrew Wikipedia. A good insight actually, which allowed me to understand a few things better (as I am very interested with Israel, and often research things about it- generally Greeks have a good opinion on Israel, but antisemitism and Palestine leave a . . mark as in every other country). In return, I decided to give you a good insight of our community, as I am grateful for this long answer, which helped me to understand some things.

Apologies for any misunderstandings regarding the community, as I wasn't very familiar with the Hebrew Wikipedia.