There is a Wikipedia in Cebuano. It has 6,115,840 articles.
To put that next to something familiar: English Wikipedia has 7,215,950. So the Cebuano one is about 85.0% the size of the English one.
That would be a remarkable thing for a language with no global reach to have built. It is remarkable for a different reason.
People Did Not Write It
Wikipedia publishes, for free and for anyone, a count of how many pages were created each month and whether a bot or a person created them. You do not have to guess.
Of Cebuano's 6,115,840 pages, bots made 6,089,484. People made 23,583.
That is 99.6% of an encyclopedia.
The same happened in Waray, another Philippine language, at 90.2%. Across all 7 Philippine language Wikipedias there are 7,483,672 articles, and 7,232,538 of them — 96.6% — were made by machines.
And Almost Nobody Reads Them
Here is the number that settles it. Take a year of views and divide by the number of pages.
Cebuano gets 6.0 views per article per year. Waray gets 6.7.
Tagalog — the national language, whose Wikipedia is 124 times smaller and almost entirely handwritten — gets 1,167.9.
That is 196 times more readers per article. And Tagalog gets more total views than Cebuano as well, on a fraction of the pages.
What People Actually Click
Not every view is someone reading an article. Some are the front page, some are the search box, some are housekeeping pages.
On Cebuano, 64.7% of the traffic to its most-visited pages is that kind of thing rather than reading. On Tagalog it is 34.2%.
And the single most-read actual article in Cebuano that month was Cyclamen, with 2,214 views. It is a European garden flower. That is what you get when an encyclopedia is generated out of species databases.
Tagalog's was José Rizal, with 6,888. Below him that month: Buwan ng Wika, Andrés Bonifacio, the Philippine–American War.
One of those is a country reading about itself. The other is a filing cabinet.
Is There A Community Behind It?
That was my first thought too — maybe the bot just got things started and people took over.
Cebuano's busiest month ever had 171 human editors. Tagalog's had 253. Roughly the same number of people, and one encyclopedia is 124 times bigger than the other.
Nobody Did Anything Wrong
The bot ran with permission and out in the open, and what it wrote is not false. Nobody was tricked.
The useful lesson is smaller and more practical. "Number of articles" is a statistic anyone can inflate by writing a script. "Did anyone read it" is not. When you see a ranking, ask which kind of number it is built on.
Two Things I Cannot Tell You
How many articles exist right now. The free data counts pages created each month, not pages currently alive, so deletions are not subtracted. It is the same measure for every language here, so the comparison is fair, but it is not a live count and I have not called it one.
Anything about what the articles say. Wikipedia's statistics are free of all conditions. The writing is not: it carries a licence this site does not use. So I took counts and titles, and never a sentence of any article.
Want to see all the charts and data tables?
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