Just before the New Year, Wikipedia cracked Alexa's list of the top 100 English-language websites for the first time, and its traffic rankings continue to rise.

Wikipedia first entered the top 100 on 29 December, as the result of steady growth since September in particular. While the initial surge was part of an Internet-wide increase in traffic to reference sites, attributed primarily to start-of-school traffic from students, Wikipedia appears to be holding its gains and building on them.

When last checked, Wikipedia was sitting at #92 for English-language websites. It had also moved into the top 200 in global terms (using Alexa's three-month average), reaching #196 in that list.

In the near future, Wikipedia might become the second most popular "dot-org" in the world, based on Alexa statistics, ranking behind only craigslist. At the moment, Wikipedia traffic is very close with that of miniforum.org, a Chinese language site, for second place.

But future growth also depends on having the technical capacity to grow. In addition to the challenge of keeping enough servers to handle the load, the Wikimedia Foundation has new limitations to overcome.

Lately, Wikimedia has been running up against the limits of its internet connection speed, which had a maximum of 100 megabits per second. According to developer Jamesday, a switch to a one gigabit per second connection was planned for last Wednesday, but the colocation facility was missing a part needed to make the change. At last report, the part had not yet arrived and the schedule for the changeover was not determined.