2009/4/21 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2009/4/21 Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com:
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.
Yes, that would work. Or, perhaps more easily, we could compare the page views per subdomain with the percentages given by Alexa. Are those numbers available anywhere?
I don't think there's a handy figure available, but you could probably get a quick-and-dirty first-order comparison using the viewing figures for a single high-profile target like the frontpage. Using this metric, hmm:
en.wp [[Main Page]] - 192870187 in March en.wp [[Special:Search]] - 474835986 in March
zh.wp [[Wikipedia:首页]] - 925156 in March zh.wp [[Special:Search]] - 1254441 in March
ratio of pageviews for the main page, ~ 210:1 in favour of enwp; for search, 380:1 in favour of enwp.
So this would suggest that zhwp, at a very rough estimate, gets about 0.5% to 0.25% of the traffic that enwp does.