I have been using free data from
http://www.compete.com/ to compare
Wiktionary to other dictionary sites for the past two months. It is very
humbling to see that
Wiktionary.org has 15% of the visits of Merriam Webster
Online and 40% of the visits of
Dictionary.com. It is also humbling that
the leading search term bringing users to Wiktionary (after "Wiktionary")
has been "MILF".
The statistics do not seem to motivate most of our senior contributors to
make many changes however. The ethic of hostility to "commercial"
considerations is strong. There is an opportunity for WMF to display
leadership by conveying to the contributing community its hopes and dreams
about the measured effect of our projects on the Internet-using population.
A project like English Wiktionary could well stand to know a great deal more
about the nature of its user population. How many are English native
speakers? How important are Pronunciation, Etymology, more powerful search,
means of suggesting alternative search terms? What benefits might make them
consider registration? How do they get to Wiktionary?
We attempt to solicit Feedback and have started looking at terms sought in
failed searches, but these sources of information do not tell us enough
about our users. We could use such information.
On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 3:05 AM, Stu West <stu(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
At Wikimania I gave a short lightening talk on some
recently donated data
from an audience measurement company called comScore. A few people suggested
that I send around a summary so I put together a page on meta at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Stu/comScore_data_on_Wikimedia. Here
are some highlights of comScore's estimates for June 2008:
- over 250 million users accessed at least one of our projects (29% of all
internet users!)
- combined, our projects are the #5 web "property" in the world
- we had the highest "reach" in Latin America, where 41% of internet users
visited at least one of our projects
- we had the lowest reach in Asia (20%).
Jay Walsh on the staff is managing the comScore relationship overall, Erik
Zachte is helping drive the statistical analysis, and a volunteer named Josh
Holman has a lot of experience with comScore data. Feel free to reach out to
any of us with questions.
-stu
--
Dennis C. During
But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully
believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest
animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions ? -- Charles Darwin