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@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