[Foundation-l] Outdated manual

[Orionist]

On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 3:27 PM, Milos Rancic <wikimedia at millosh.org> wrote:
>
> * Alexa may be unreliable, mostly for smaller sites, but:
> ** Wikipedia is not small site, as well as top ten sites aren't. Bigger
> numbers give more relevant conclusions.
> ** It gives good clue of what the trends are. I remember that Wikipedia
> was indeed at the fifth place in 2009 or so. And it shows drop from the
> fifth place, which has relation with other observable trends.
> ** People are going to Alexa to check trends and ratings. We can dispute
> reliability, but we can't dispute overall impression based on
> differences between our source and Alexa.
>
> * Baidu is on the 6th place on Alexa [1], counting Google at 1st,
> Youtube at 4th and Blogger at 5th place. QQ is at 10th place counting
> three Google's sites. And none of them is at the top 10 list on
> comScore. Willing to hear reasons for that.

The main difference between the comScore and Alexa stats is what they
consider as "site". Alexa seems to be ranking top-level domains while
comScore groups websites that belong to one entity. That explains why
YouTube and Blogger are not on comScore's list, and the different order of
top websites. Also, comScore stats are for January 2010, before Google
pulled out of China, which maybe the reason Baidu didn't show up in the top
ten then. If you group websites on Alexa by entity you'll have Wikipedia.org
move from 8th to 6th place, and that without including other WMF sites, like
Wikimedia.org which is ranked 182. So the results may not be that different
after all, especially since our Alexa rank has been actually hovering around
7 for the past months (You can check Alexa rank history back to Q2 2009 by
clicking "Traffic stats" and from the drop down menu below the graph choose
"max".)

Despite all that, I still think saying that we are one of the "top-ten"
sites just to be on the safe side and avoid misunderstandings.

Regards,
--
Orionist