[WikiEN-l] We've been overtaken.

[Andrew Gray]

2009/4/22 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>:
> 2009/4/22 Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk>:
>> So this would suggest that zhwp, at a very rough estimate, gets about
>> 0.5% to 0.25% of the traffic that enwp does.
>
> And Alexa says it gets 1.1% of Wikipedia traffic and enwiki gets
> 54.0%. That means zhwiki gets 0.02% the traffic of enwiki. So the two
> measures get similar results.

2%, surely?

Anyway, I decided to see what this looks like for all wikis. I've done
this for the top ten, which accounting to Alexa get 92.1% of our
traffic - en, ja, de, es, ru, fr, it, pl, pt, zh, in that order.

It's quite interesting - Chinese is a drastic outlier, but we have
broad disagreements for some languages and not others. After a bit of
normalising, the Alexa traffic share versus the "main page" traffic
share comes out as roughly the same for English, German and Russian.

For Japanese and Spanish, the Alexa traffic share is about a third
higher than the main-page traffic would suggest; for Chinese, it's
four times higher.

For French, the Alexa traffic share is about 20% under what my metric
suggests; Portuguese, 30% under; Polish, 50% under; and Italian, 60%
under.

There's two interpretations here:

a) Main page traffic is not a consistent pattern across all
Wikipedias; some drive a far higher fraction of their visitors through
the front page than others.

b) Alexa has some statistical mis-scaling going on for some languages.

I'll see if I can scare up some better figures - but whichever answer
we use, there's certainly something odd about zhwp!

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk