Statistics related to Africa

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Statistics related to Africa. Resources, specific statistics and reports.

Web access by region/country

Page views by category

Query category Africa/Afrika/Afrique on WikiAfrica project languages English/French/Italian and also Afrikaans/Swahili. Reports will be updated monthly (under construction).

Reports for January 2013: English, French, Italian, Afrikaans, Swahili

Breakdown of categories included/excluded. Each report with page views has a sister report which lists the full category tree included and mentions which subcategories were left out.

Reports for January 2013: English, French, Italian, Afrikaans, Swahili

Methodology

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Analysis by category. The statistics are collected through a script by Erik Zachte that can collect for almost any wikipedia all categories below some arbitrary root category, then collect all article titles for those categories, then collect page views for each article and rank those by popularity.

Categories excluded. The script allows also a blacklist of categories that should not be expanded, as those are too generic and would pull in too much content outside the topic at hand (they would spawn a large sub-tree of categories most of which would not be relevant. Examples of too broad categories for top category Africa are religions, world wars, Mediterranean geography, etc.).

Views by region. At the moment it is not possible to see how much of the content on Africa is viewed from Africa. We can do a breakdown of page views by region/country even for edits (please refer above) but not on this detailed level.

Challenges.

The script needs some further attention to handle unicode input well. Otherwise I would have included Arabian rightaway.
Articles with tens of categories. Sometimes an article has tens of categories. And one of those causes inclusion in the report. That does not necessarily mean the page views for that article are primarily related to that aspect of the article. A striking example is this one: in the report on English Wikipedia based on category "Painters by nationality" number one most viewed page is for Adolf Hitler.
Those page view stats are for Wikipedia's *main site only*, not Wikipedia's mobile site (which in July 2013 represents some 17% of overall total, but even more in countries where mobile traffic dominates). So absolute page views are probably way too low, probably especially in Afrikaans and Swahili.

The idea is to run these reports every month.