As you all may have seen there is tons of media coverage coming out around Wikipedia's 10th anniversary (Jan 15, 2011). In the midst of this the Pew Internet Research Center released a new report today:
"Wikipedia, past and present" http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Wikipedia.aspx
-- phoebe
On Thursday, January 13, 2011, phoebe ayers wrote:
"Wikipedia, past and present" http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Wikipedia.aspx
Given how much Google juice WP has, I find it unintuitive that only "53% of adult internet users" "use Wikipedia to look for information". I thought this low number is perhaps people thinking this means they type the query into Wikipedia itself. Pew is always thorough, so looking for the questions I see [1] and infer the question was:
Thinking about your internet use overall... Please tell me if you ever use the internet to do any of the following things. Do you ever use the internet to [Look for information on Wikipedia] ? / Did you happen to do this yesterday, or not?
...?
[1]: http://pewinternet.org/Shared-Content/Data-Sets/2010/May-2010--Cell-Phones.a...
Just a reminder that Pew is exclusive to the U.S. so that's 53% of *American *adult internet users using Wikipedia.
Steven Walling
On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 1:06 PM, Joseph Reagle joseph.2008@reagle.orgwrote:
On Thursday, January 13, 2011, phoebe ayers wrote:
"Wikipedia, past and present" http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Wikipedia.aspx
Given how much Google juice WP has, I find it unintuitive that only "53% of adult internet users" "use Wikipedia to look for information". I thought this low number is perhaps people thinking this means they type the query into Wikipedia itself. Pew is always thorough, so looking for the questions I see [1] and infer the question was:
Thinking about your internet use overall... Please tell me if you ever
use the internet to do any of the following things. Do you ever use the internet to [Look for information on Wikipedia] ? / Did you happen to do this yesterday, or not?
...?
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 1:06 PM, Joseph Reagle joseph.2008@reagle.org wrote:
On Thursday, January 13, 2011, phoebe ayers wrote:
"Wikipedia, past and present" http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Wikipedia.aspx
Given how much Google juice WP has, I find it unintuitive that only "53% of adult internet users" "use Wikipedia to look for information". I thought this low number is perhaps people thinking this means they type the query into Wikipedia itself. Pew is always thorough, so looking for the questions I see [1] and infer the question was:
Thinking about your internet use overall... Please tell me if you ever use the internet to do any of the following things. Do you ever use the internet to [Look for information on Wikipedia] ? / Did you happen to do this yesterday, or not?
...?
This is totally anecdotal and may or may not have any basis in reality, but I find that tons of people don't know they're using Wikipedia when they are. They either don't recognize it, or just click on the first search link and don't pay attention, or use a mirror that actually has WP content.... the chances of being an internet search engine user and not at least accidentally encountering wikipedia at some point seem pretty low. Hard to measure that, though.
-- phoebe
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