Constructing a Common Ground: Analyzing the quality and usage of International Auxiliary Languages in Wikipedia

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the quality, usage, and growth potential of International Auxiliary Languages on Wikipedia, comparing them with natural languages and proposing a new categorization methodology.

Contribution

It introduces a new methodology for categorizing wikis and provides a comprehensive analysis of IALs' content and usage on Wikipedia, highlighting growth opportunities.

Findings

1. 1.3 million articles in IALs with 15.6 million monthly views.

2. IAL editions are proportional to their community sizes.

3. Growth depends on increasing content quality and quantity.

Abstract

International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) are constructed languages designed to facilitate communication among speakers of different native languages while fostering equality, efficiency, and cross-cultural understanding. This study focuses on analyzing the editions of IALs on Wikipedia, including Simple English, Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Volapuk, Interlingue, and Novial. We compare them with three natural languages: English, Spanish, and Catalan. Our aim is to establish a basis for the use of IALs in Wikipedia as well as showcase a new methodology for categorizing wikis. We found in total there are 1.3 million articles written in these languages and they gather 15.6 million monthly views. Although this is not a negligible amount of content, in comparison with large natural language projects there is still a big room for improvement. We concluded that IAL editions on Wikipedia are similar to other projects, behaving proportionally to their communities' size. Therefore, the key to their growth is augmenting the amount and quality of the content offered in these languages. To that end, we offer a set of statistics to understand and improve these projects, and we developed a webpage that displays our findings to foster knowledge sharing and facilitate the expansion of the IAL communities.