Wikipedia offers articles about 'Coworking' in 23 languages
On Wikipedia, 'Coworking' is already in the lead compared with other flexible workspaces, as a look at the retrievals on the English-speaking version shows. There are also more language versions, even compared with the average of other articles. In total, you can find information in 23 languages about 'coworking'.
The articles are currently requested by 0.00022% of all Wikipedia users in comparison to all other pages on the encyclopedia. But even in this area, it is possible to discover a development which led to a total of 450,000 page views last year.** Five years ago, there were only 65,000. And that number climbed steadily up to the year 2013, however, the hits then collapsed clearly —and this cannot only be based on seasonal fluctuations. (The retrievals reached their highest point once again in September 2014.)
Коворкинг рулс: ‘Coworking’ in Russian has the most requests
The requests decreased strongly, particularly on the Japanese, and Portuguese versions and have remained at that level until now. But this dip was again particularly smoothed out by the Russian-speaking version.
Wikipedia has declined in Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese – and has boomed up in Russian until February
Unlike with Google, the data on Wikipedia is based on absolute figures. The total retrievals can change each year. After a year-long climb in requests, the online encyclopaedia doesn't grow anymore in terms of pageviews since 2013.You can learn more about this at the end of this article**.
In the Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese versions, the page views sank considerably, while the English version showed a slight downward trend. The Russian version, by contrast, had established itself, up until February 2015, as the second-most requested language version after the English. Last year, the Russain version came in fifth place. This also influenced the requests for articles about 'coworking”.*** On average, users requested considerably more non-English-speaking articles on this topic than other articles.
Meanwhile, the Russian version is far ahead, in absolute terms and also in relative comparisons on the topic of “coworking”.**** A press spokeswoman for Wikimedia explains: “There’s a strong probability that the Russian media link to the Russian “coworking” page as a source for people who don’t yet know the word.”
Hardly any edit wars surrounding 'Coworking'
Regarding content, edit wars rarely develop around the coworking articles. Only related links, the names of individual coworking spaces, or services were mainly added and removed. The English version was edited most often - on average, every six days. This is followed by the Spanish and the Dutch versions, at almost every nine, and the German, every ten days.
Alternative terms for 'Coworking' are rarely used
The Spanish edition stands out as another special case. In October 2013, the title “Coworking” was renamed to “trabajo cooperativo" (in English: cooperative work). This change was possibly based on an aversion to anglicisms. 'Coworking' doesn’t necessarly mean 'cooperation', so the new title isn't really accurate. And even in the Spanish language, the term is more unpopular than 'Coworking': According to Google Trends, “trabajo cooperativo” was used especially in Venezuela and El Salvador, which have not yet attracted much attention as hotspots for coworking spaces. In addition, “cotrabajo” has not made itself known as a viable alternative.
On the other hand, “coworking” was mainly unproblematically adopted In other writing systems. That is to say that 'コワーキング' means simply 'coworking' in the Japanese writing system (unfortunately including a hyphen).
