Of interest... an altmetrics paper published this week, "Altmetrics in the Wild: Using Social Media to Explore Scholarly Impact" http://arxiv.org/html/1203.4745v1
counts Wikipedia citations as one possible alt-metric for scholars. I got lost in the statistics around relationship between alt and traditional metrics and use, but one of the takeaways is that around 5% of their sample of 24,331 articles from PLOS (everything ever published in PLOS) were cited in Wikipedia.
The article is interesting for other reasons, but I am intrigued by this 5% number. What do you think of this measure? At first I thought -- "wow, 5% (1200 articles) is pretty high! We are doing a good job at citing the scholarly literature!" Then I thought -- "actually, considering all the bio articles on Wikipedia, it's pretty low!" Then I thought "but this is only PLOS, which has only been around for a decade, so actually that's pretty high!"
Anyway, an interesting paper for the bibliometrics geeks among us.
cheers, phoebe