[Wikipedia-l] Look Who's Using Wikipedia

[Frederick "FN" Noronha]

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1595184,00.html

Look Who's Using Wikipedia
Thursday, Mar. 01, 2007 By BILL TANCER
The Wikipedia home page

Poor Wikipedia. Professional Golfer Fuzzy Zoeller is suing one of its
contributors for a defamatory cyber-attack. And last year, television
host and comedian Stephen Colbert urged his audience to vandalize a
Wikipedia entry about elephants to prove the point that in a model
where any user can edit encyclopedia entries, those entries are only
as good as their source. Take the case of retired journalist John
Seigenthaler, a former assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy,
who was wrongfully accused of involvement in the assassination of
Robert and John Kennedy by an anonymous Wikipedia contributor in 2005.
Given the controversy stirring around Wikipedia, the history
department at Middlebury College has banned its use as a research
source. When did the online form of the dust-covered encyclopedia
become such a magnet for drama?

Academics are split on the usefulness of Wikipedia, which bills itself
as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." The sheer volume of
content (Wikipedia claims over 5.3 million entries, 1.6 million in
English) is partly responsible for the site's dominance as an online
reference. When compared to the top 3,200 educational reference sites
in the U.S., Wikipedia is #1, capturing 24.3% of all visits to the
category, according to Hitwise data. But as the recent drama
illustrates, a body of online knowledge built by an army of 75,000
volunteer, anonymous contributors and editors is prone to anything
from simple benign errors to outright information vandalism.

Search and Internet behavior data provide alarming insight into this
powerful but volatile resource — alarming because one of the core
groups of Wikipedia users are school children.

Determining the extent to which students leverage Wikipedia requires
some data detective work. The search terms that users enter to
navigate to the site are the most revealing. Along with searches for
various anime cartoons, sex topics and information on the most
recently shorn, exposed or departed celebrities, the majority of top
terms bear a close resemblance to elementary school homework and
research projects. During the month of February, which is also Black
History month, three of the top 20 terms sending traffic to Wikipedia
were for prominent black historical figures, while two other searches
were likely motivated by President's Day. In fact, changing
time-frames to any other month during the school year reveals a
similar result. (Source: Hitwise)

Along with the impressive growth in visits to the site, 680% in two
years, charting those visits over time confirms student activity. Over
the last three years of growth, traffic dipped during the summer
months and the weeks of spring break and winter vacation.

One of the reasons for Wikipedia's stellar growth rate in visits is
all the traffic it receives from search engines, over 64% last week.
In fact, due to Google's algorithm for displaying search results and
the abundance of links in any given entry, Wikipedia has become the #1
external site visited after Google's search page.

As students begin their online research, they could view the
prevalence of Wikipedia references in Google as proof of the accuracy
and reliability of the source. Given the search exposure and sheer
volume of data available on the site, they might fall into the trap of
relying on a single source for their education. Hopefully their
research projects won't involve elephants or professional golfers.

Bill Tancer is general manager of global research at Hitwise.
-- 
FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please)
http://fn.goa-india.org  http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com
What bloggers are saying about Goa: http://planet.goa-india.org/