“Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”

…tonight, I’m going to offer a little present for all my friends from France, my dear country of birth.

Germany has always been a kind of nemesis for us. Not to mention a couple of wars in the past century, France’s defeat in World Cup semi-finals in 1986 remains a memorable humiliation for Frenchmen.

We know that we are quite prone to lament on our alleged shortcomings when it comes to IT. Actually I have posted something in that direction myself recently : it is true that France lags far behind the US. Nonetheless, I have been quite struck in the past few months about a bunch of data comparing France and Germany, indicating that France was actually way more advanced in terms of market penetration for high-band connections (thanks to a tougher competition and a lighter regulation, my dear socialist friends). It is true that this doesn’t really mean that French are less reluctant than their German counterparts to participate to the Web 2.0 phenomenon. After all, most of our Internet “boxes” are purchased by regular families trying to cut their phone bills rather than by geeks.

So, in order to understand this more clearly I have created my own homemade indicator: the number of pages on Wikipedia.

Last July, while being bored during my internship spared time (in a remarkable strategy consultancy that I definitely recommend, Advention Business Partners), I had calculated that the number of pages in French in Wikipedia (in Wikipedia.fr, of course) represented around 25% of the English pages  (Wikipedia.com) and 75%  of the German pages (Wikipedia.de). Logical, since French speaking people (112m) are slightly less numerous than German-speaking folks (125m) ? Let’s see.

During the past two months, I have continued keeping records of these statistics. Here is the good news:

             As you may see, not only have we jumped from 75% to 80% in more or less 6 months, but the ratio of French pages is constantly improving. Actually, we are gaining around 1% per month. Even if the graph seems pretty flat, just consider that it means than in only one month, there has been a difference in the number of new entries of 5000 pages in favour of Wikipedia.fr. If this trend continues undisturbed, Wikipedia’s French pages will outnumber the German ones by Fall/Winter 2008.

OK, this indicator might seem definitely lousy, inasmuch as it doesn’t take into account any qualitative aspects : accuracy, completeness of pages, etc… However, I believe that it is yet another (modest) element to demonstrate that there is no fate for IT-illiteracy in any country. People are eager to communicate, and developing Internet connections is not so costly if fair competition conditions are guaranteed. As a consequence, I do not believe in an everlasting “digital divide”.

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