Filed under: metrics
New traffic data from Hitwise (.doc)
suggests that by their standards, Wikipedia is also in the top 20 orgs
with popular websites; though some, such as Yahoo, MSN, Google and
Myspace, have more than one site ahead of it. Thanks to Hitwise for sharing their results for the millionth article press release.
I hope that some of these leisure sites will start to integrate more
useful content with their portals, and not remain paeans to the id; it
is heartwarming to see useful content providers (such as pure search
engines, and news portals) near the tops of the list.
Wikipedia fields 11% of education-related traffic, and 0.17%
of all traffic they measured, with Answers.com getting 1/3 of
that. I asked for details on their methodology and sample size;
they claim 25 million users, but I don’t know their distribution,
geographically or otherwise. They also show a pretty flat age
distribution from 18 through 44, and an even split along gender lines.
That 11% of Education-related traffic figure is a little scary to me.
I’m a big fan of Wikipedia and what it has done for the web, but it seems like we’ve become to reliant on it. Kids these days view it as an 100% trustworthy source of information. Even though, the founder of Wikipedia doesn’t even think you should be using the site if you’re looking for the hard facts.
According to a recent report, on average a wikipedia article contains 4 major errors (same as Encylopedia Britannica). Seriously, they should leave the lies to these guys.
Comment by Zane 03.14.06 @ 8:20 pm