WikiLingSupp

Of the approximately 7000 languages currently being spoken around the globe, only a few hundred see any use in the digital domain. A key indicator for digital ascent, concluded by Kornai (2013) in his seminal work Digital Language Death, ist the existance of a Wikipedia: "No wikipedia, no ascent". While WikiLingDiv (Essfors, 2026) quantifies the linguistic diversity in the usage of Wikipedia across time and space, it lacks an indicator of the relative usefullness, or support, of different language editions of Wikipedias across time, which can be considered instrumental in explaining why different languages are used. This dataset provides precisely this, a time-layered dataset indicating the number of articles, users, and edits for a given language edition for each year from 2008 to 2025. The dataset was derived using archived versions of the the Wikipedia statitsics data tab (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data:Wikipedia_statistics/data.tab) and combines the indicators to generate a composite index of relative wikipedia extensiveness and quality. The source code is available at https://github.com/Eszettfors/WikiLingSupp.The data is published as a csv file with the following columns: ISO6393 (character) - Uniquely identifies each language edition as a recognized linguistic variety. year (integer) admins (integer) - Snapshot of the number of admins for language X at year Y articles (double) - Total number of articles available in Language X at year Y edits (integer) - Cumulative number of edits for language X at year Y composite (double) - Average z-score of admins, articles and edits, min-max scaled. Kornai, A. (2013). Digital language death. PLOS ONE, 8(10), e77056. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0077056Essfors, H. (2026). WikiLingDiv [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18526766