Recent data from companies tracking global Internet use continues to rank Wikipedia highly, and its appeal outside the United States is driving those rankings even higher as those companies do a better job of accounting for the worldwide audience. However, some of this information suggests that Wikipedia's penetration in parts of Asia has been much weaker.
One of several companies that regularly reports on surveys of Internet use, comScore Networks, debuted a new global survey last week that ranked Wikipedia sites as having the seventh-largest number of visitors worldwide. Previous reports from comScore, as well as its competitors, have typically focused only on visitors from the United States. The new report credited Wikipedia sites with 131,949,000 unique visitors in March, indicating that 19% of the global audience visited at some point.
This ranking for Wikipedia is noticeably higher than most previous estimates for a variety of reasons. One is that Wikipedia's popularity is frequently greater outside the U.S., as is also indicated by the recent addition of country-by-country data from Alexa Internet. Another reason is that comScore's report, unlike Alexa, consolidates a number of sites into groups based on their parent company. Thus Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google, each of which has multiple sites ranked ahead of Wikipedia according to Alexa, only appear once on comScore's list. Meanwhile, Wikipedia presumably also benefits from the addition of traffic going to sister projects. Finally, comScore does not show any independent Chinese sites, several of which rank ahead of Wikipedia on Alexa, although it does report that China has the world's second-largest Internet population.
In April, Alexa added breakdowns by country to its existing traffic rankings. Although Wikipedia currently stands at #13 in the U.S. rankings, it comes in several spots higher in a number of countries, especially in Europe. Its highest ranking in any country is #5 in Germany, followed by #7 in New Zealand. Pakistan, despite reports of Wikipedia being blocked briefly last month (see archived story), has Wikipedia at #9.
On the other hand, Wikipedia does not appear in the top 100 at all in either mainland China or Taiwan (although it is #94 in Hong Kong), along with South Korea. Accessing Wikipedia in China remains difficult, of course, due to the blocking of the site. Some other Asian countries also have fairly low rankings, including Thailand (#76) and Vietnam (#84). In Saudi Arabia, another country where rumors have occasionally come up about Wikipedia being blocked, Wikipedia barely sneaks onto the list at #100.
According to Alexa, Wikipedia reached a traffic rank of #14 worldwide on 1 May, one of its highest figures to date. This is using the daily traffic rank, which can fluctuate considerably, and Wikipedia has even ranked higher on two occasions. However, according to comments on Wikipedia:Awareness statistics, these earlier peaks may actually have been the result of brief dips in the rankings of the major Chinese sites, such as Baidu. Baidu has recently launched its own wiki-like encyclopedia, Baidu Baike (Baike is based on the Chinese term for encyclopedia), although submissions are reportedly moderated and not designated as free content.
Wikimania recap
28 August 2006
Wikimania recap
14 August 2006
Wikimania recap
7 August 2006
Wikimania last-minute information
31 July 2006
Events: Contests, parties, and the local area
24 July 2006
Wikimania updates
17 July 2006
Wikimania updates
10 July 2006
Meetups And Newsworthy International Assemblages
3 July 2006
More featured speakers at Wikimania
26 June 2006
Hacking Days
19 June 2006
Featured Speakers at Wikimania
12 June 2006
Other international meetups
5 June 2006
About Wikimania
29 May 2006
About Wikimania
22 May 2006
About Wikimania
15 May 2006
About Wikimania
8 May 2006
About Wikimania
1 May 2006
About Wikimania
24 April 2006
Three years of meetups : 2003-2006
17 April 2006
Introduction to a series: Looking forward to Wikimania 2006
10 April 2006
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Wikimania recap |
This week, we take a look back at Wikimania 2005, the first broadly international Wikimedia gathering.
The first Wikimania was held in August 2005, in Frankfurt, Germany. It was conceived of as the first international conference of the Wikimedia Foundation, and a chance for members from all the various projects and communities to meet. It had grown from an idea into a certainty the previous summer, at which point a discussion and vote was held on Meta regarding where in the world such an event should be held, leading to a final city selection in late October. There was talk about whether to make the conference an annual affair.
Frankfurt am Main was chosen as the host city. One of the advantages of holding it there was the promise of a venue other than a hotel which could offer both housing and conference halls. This was the Haus der Jugend, a youth hostel and conference center in Frankfurt's old city.
Wikimania included a session of hacking days and a main conference; together, these took over the Haus der Jugend for a week. Breakfasts and lunches were group affairs in the hostel's cafeteria, and a party Saturday night left everyone in high spirits. Ten conference speakers and attendees from around the world had their attendance sponsored by the Open Society Institute; they arrived early in the week, and stayed through the end of the conference. Other conference sponsors included Socialtext, Answers.com, DocCheck, Gruppo Logos, and Sun Microsystems, which sponsored the party.
Hacking days ran from Monday to Thursday, and involved a growing number of developers as the week passed. Each day saw a few long discussions on a particular theme related to Wikimedia servers or MediaWiki development. By Thursday, when hacking days ended at lunch, there were some 30 people present.
The main conference ran for three days, drawing speakers from industry and Wikimedians from 51 countries. Almost 400 people came to part of the event; on the busiest day, there were 300 in attendance at one time. The local and national media loved the conference; over 100 of them came to part of the conference as well. The Haus der Jugend was festive, and host also to a few other groups during this week. It had a large lounge and patios open all night. They were good-natured about being overrun by Wikimaniacs, and allowed a small building in their courtyard to be used throughout the week as an organization center.
Next week, we continue with an in-depth look at Wikimania 2005.
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Three users - Raul654, Mindspillage, and Sj - represented Wikimedia at Friday's session of the ACM CFP-2006 conference. Several speakers - notably EFF lawyer Mike Godwin and science fiction author Vernor Vinge - spoke in glowing terms of Wikipedia. (Vinge later said the plenary session discussing Wikipedia was one of the highlights of the conference for him.)
Mr. Vinge also passed along a request for a certain feature (a sort of "Wayback Wikipedia" where it would be possible to view all articles on Wikipedia as they existed at a certain point in time) and Mindspillage dutifully filed the request for him.
Laura Chang, science editor for the New York Times writes on the difficulty of reporting ongoing scientific research: "Even so, do you really want to wait until every finding is textbook-ready? To me, the sidewinding movement toward knowledge is itself interesting, even when the results are inconclusive, and sooner or later the false leads will be identified. Like Wikipedia, science is a self-correcting enterprise." [1]
An ongoing dispute over the Cuba article was examined in an article by reporter Pablo Bachelet, carried in several Knight Ridder newspapers, including the Miami Herald: "Cuba entry in Wikipedia stirs controversy". The story included a number of excerpts from the debate on the talk page, and also noted aspects such as the fact that the article does not mention the Helms-Burton Act (part of the ongoing United States embargo against Cuba).
The Canada Free Press notes a smaller-scale tug-of-war in the Toronto Port Authority article in "Wikipedia wars", and provides a list of errors in the article. Editors at the article are already researching the issues the journalist mentions, and adding the correct facts to the article.
The Village Voice noted the conflict over the Wikitruth article in an opinion piece at "Wikipedia spars with a splinter site for truth".
As noted last week, Jimmy Wales was given a Pioneer Award on Wednesday, May 3 (see archived story). The award was noted this week at MSNBC and TMCnet. TMCnet also noted that Jimmy will be speaking at "FM 10 Openness: Code, Science and Content", a conference organized by the journal First Monday.
The search engine optimization and search engine marketing articles have been discussed by SEO expert Bill Slawski (User:Bill Slawski) in his SEO by the SEA blog, in his post "Improving the Wikipedia results for Search Engine Optimization". He felt the existing article was very weak, and says:
The latest admin to become a bureaucrat is Taxman (nom).
Eight users were granted admin status last week: FloNight (nom), Silsor (nom), AndyZ (nom), Snoutwood (nom), Saravask (nom), RadioKirk (nom), Lar (nom) and JoshuaZ (nom).
Seven articles were featured last week: Cædmon (nom), Nellie Kim (nom), Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (nom), Illmatic (nom), Mercury (planet) (nom), 2005 Atlantic hurricane season (nom) and Defense of Sihang Warehouse (nom). Two articles were de-featured: Strategic management and Weather lore.
2005 Atlantic hurricane season is the 8th FA by the Tropical cyclones WikiProject, and the 4th tropical storm related FA by Titoxd. Worldtraveller produced yet another astronomy related FA with Mercury. Bunchofgrapes has diverged from recent food related FAs (Cheese, Butter, and Black pepper) to successfully nominate Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Starship Troopers, Bangalore, Chew Valley Lake, Albatross, Solar eclipse, Gerald Ford and Rabindranath Tagore.
These were the pictures of the day last week: White's Tree Frog, Airplane vortex, Apache Wickiup, Nez Perce, Navy binoculars, Cows in green field and Montreal Twilight Panorama.
Two pictures reached featured picture status last week:
__NEWSECTIONLINK__ was introduced, which allows users to add a "new section" link (shown as a tab in Monobook) to pages which aren't talk pages. (Rob Church)<title> tags in SVG files allowed. (Rob Church)<li> links fixed. (Ashar Voultoiz)Fifteen new servers (srv81-96) were set up and put into rotation this week; the hardware team were busy with all the intensive work and configuration changes that were required.
Other server-related events, problems, and changes included:
The Arbitration Committee closed four cases this week. Additionally, Herschelkrustofsky was banned for one year in a motion in a prior case.
A case against FourthAve was closed on Tuesday. As a result, FourthAve was banned from Wikipedia for 1 year, and placed on indefinite personal attack parole, probation, and general probation. FourthAve was found to have made personal attacks and engaged in "aggressive point of view editing" on articles relating to the University of Dubuque and Jim Nussle.
A case against Lou franklin was closed on Friday. As a result, Lou franklin was indefinitely banned from pages and talk pages relating to societal attitudes towards homosexuality, and placed on personal attack and revert paroles. Lou franklin had edit-warred, and the Committee called him a "disruptive" and "ineffective" editor.
A case against editors on Depleted uranium was closed on Saturday. As a result, Nrcprm2026, a.k.a. James S., was banned from articles relating to depleted uranium and uranium trioxide, and placed on probation and general probation. TDC was also placed on a one-revert-per-day limit for a year, and users who had made personal attacks on James S. were warned. James S. and TDC had edit warred on the pages in question.
A case brought against Aucaman was closed on Sunday. As a result, Xebat and all his accounts were banned for one year, and Aucaman, Zmmz, SouthernComfort, ManiF, Kashk, and User:Khoikhoi were placed on probation for one year. Aucaman and SouthernComfort were also banned from editing articles relating to Persians and Iranians, and Zmmz was banned from editing Persian people and Iranian peoples. Xebat had made ethnic-related personal attacks, while Aucaman had made lesser personal attacks, and all parties in the case had edit warred.
A motion to ban Herschelkrustofsky for one year passed on Friday. The measure, which received 6 support votes and no opposition, amended a previous case.
Cases involving Deathrocker (user page), Infinity0 (user page), Sam Spade (user page), and PoolGuy (user page) were accepted this week. All are the evidence phase.
An additional case involving editors on Biological psychiatry is in the evidence phase.
Cases involving users SqueakBox and Zapatancas, Messhermit (user page), and Jacrosse (user page), Marcosantezana (user page), and Locke Cole (user page) are in the voting phase.
Motions to close are on the table in the cases involving Monicasdude (user page), Terryeo (user page), and users DarrenRay and 2006BC.
A motion to restrict StrangerInParadise to one user account has seven support votes with no opposition.
