[WikiEN-l] We've been overtaken.

[Ian Woollard]

Presumably the wikipedia can find out what proportion of its traffic
actually comes from China, and compare that with the Alexa statistics.
If they're close then it gives some evidence that Alexa have enough
toolbars out in the wild in China to give reasonable accuracy.


On 21/04/2009, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/4/21 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>:
>> 2009/4/21 Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>:
>
>>> So far as I can tell from percentage breakdowns by country in Alexa,
>>> the Chinese go to hudong and zh.wikipedia.org equally often- virtually
>>> the same number of page hits. However, hudong ranks 112 and
>>> wikipedia.org ranks 66 in China, which tells you that a lot of people
>>> are reading the other languages more than Chinese.
>
>> I seriously doubt that Alexa rankings at all meaningful for Chinese
>> page views. I'm not sure if it is still the case, but I seem to recall
>> that at some point the Alexa toolbar was only available in English,
>> that would explain why wikipedia.org does better - people that don't
>> speak good English are more likely to use the Chinese sites and less
>> likely to use the Alexa toolbar.
>
>
> Alexa is a rough guide only - their userbase (I heard it was ~70,000
> somewhere, but don't recall where - I see no number in the Wikipedia
> article) is large enough to provide a statistical sample, but has all
> sorts of obvious systemic biases in the sampling (IE-only,
> English-only, etc).
>
> So we're #7 on Alexa, which indicates we're popular, but not a whole lot
> more!
>
> (We're #4 on comScore because comScore aggregates different sites from
> the same company, but Alexa does it strictly by domain name, e.g.
> listing Google and YouTube separately.)
>
>
> - d.
>
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-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
imperfect world would be *much* better. Life in an imperfectly perfect
world would be pretty ghastly though.