Wikipedia talk:Multilingual monthly statistics/2001

Missing data on the earliest non-English Wikipedia projects

What are the sources for these statistical tables? They are incomplete and missing article counts in early Wikipedia language projects. For instance, there were pages for German, Catalan, and Japanese Wikipedias as early as March 2001, but the statistical table start showing their first pages until much later -- April 1 for Catalan (which is OK), but June 1 for German (a bit late), and October 2002 for Japanese (way too late!!).

Could this neglect be due to the fact that those projects started with a domain names substantially different from those used now? For instance;

• English: originally http://www.wikipedia.com, now http://en.wikipedia.org
• German: originally http://deutsche.wikipedia.com, now http://de.wikipedia.org
• Catalan: originally http://catalan.wikipedia.com, now http://ca.wikipedia.org
• Japanese: originally http://nihongo.wikipedia.com, now http://ja.wikipedia.org

Here is some evidence from the Wayback Machine, for the record:

• An early English Wikipedia "HomePage" dated 2001-03-30 10:59, already showing links to sister projects in Deutsch (German), Catalan, and Nihongo (Japanese). This shows those projects had already been started by then, officially.
• An early German language Wikipedia HomePage, dated 2001-03-30 15:16, using both German and English
• An early Japanese language Wikipedia HomePage (revision #3), dated 2001-03-20 23:00, using Romanized Japanese. A subsequent version (revision #5, dated 2001-03-23 14:52) attempts at vertical text.
• Another Japanese language Wikipedia page, dated 2001-04-06 16:31.
• An early Catalan language Wikipedia HomePage, dated 2001-03-27 07:36, almost all in Catalan language.

Therefore, the statistical tables should be corrected to include the pages created in those projects, taking account that some of which may have changed domain names. --HYC (talk) 06:59, 4 November 2008 (UTC)