Wikipedia:Awareness statistics

This page is part of the Wikipedia:Statistics family of pages. It attempts to measure the growth in public awareness of Wikipedia.

Usenet posts about Wikipedia

Monthly count of Usenet posts containing the word "Wikipedia"

Source: Google

Data extracted from Google Groups, using the estimated figure:

January 2001,   0
February 2001,  0
March 2001,     3
April 2001,     0
May 2001,       19
June 2001,      54
July 2001,      27
August 2001,    84
September 2001, 152
October 2001,   87
November 2001,  133
December 2001,  105
January 2002,   161
February 2002,  102
March 2002,     112 
April 2002,     141
May 2002,       149
June 2002,      208
July 2002,      305
August 2002,    389
September 2002, 304
October 2002,   430
November 2002,  349 
December 2002,  523
January 2003,   378
Feburary 2003,  333
March 2003,     687
April 2003,     644
May 2003,       693
June 2003,      716
July 2003,      1160
August 2003,    1140
September 2003, 1760
October 2003,   1840
November 2003,  1620

This is the search used: [1]

It is interesting to compare this graph with the graphs in Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia and Wikipedia:Traffic.

Mentions of Wikipedia on sites outside Wikipedia

This estimates the number of mentions of Wikipedia on websites outside Wikipedia itself by a Google search on "wikipedia -site:wikipedia.org -site:wikipedia.com" This is the search used: [2]

2 October 2003: 311'000
3 November 2003: 176'000
6 December 2003: 1'370'000

Google Answers using Wikipedia

Google#Google Answers - answers per month that included Wikipedia references (search used):

April 2002: 1
July 2002: 5
August 2002: 2
September 2002: 4
October 2002: 11
November 2002: 7
December 2002: 10
January 2003: 0
February 2003: 1
March 2003: 12
April 2003: 10
May 2003: 8
June 2003: 10
July 2003: 17
August 2003: 10
September 2003: 13
October 2003: 7
November 2003: 19

Google News stories mentioning Wikipedia

Google#Google News -- news stories per month that mention Wikipedia or contain links to Wikipedia: search used

June 2003: 2
July 2003: 4
August 2003: 4
September 2003: 8
October 2003: 51 (including one story in 46 copies)
Novemer 2003: 7

Google PageRank for www.wikipedia.org

Google PageRank of the main English Wikipedia homepage (www.wikipedia.org) :

22 October 2002: 6/10
3 November 2002: 7/10
1 December 2002: 8/10
10 January 2003: 8/10
15 March 2003: 7/10 (perhaps Google's algorithm has changed, unlikely that the entire internet grew faster than Wikipedia)
12 April 2003 : 7/10
30 May 2003: 7/10
2 October 2003: 8/10
7 November 2003: 8/10

Incoming links to www.wikipedia.org

Note: the earlier data from the Google and Alltheweb searches has been replaced by a new and hopefully less noisy data source, but the old data is still available in the history of this page. The problem with the earlier data is that there are now numerous sites based on mirroring Wikipedia, every page of which links back to Wikipedia. The number of links from these clone sites drowned out the statistics of links from elsewhere, making the information useless.

Alexa data for sites that link to Wikipedia, based on [http://www.alexa.com/data/ds/linksin?q=link:wikipedia.org/&url=wikipedia.org

this search]:

16 December 2003: 6849

Alexa traffic ranking for wikipedia.org

http://www.alexa.com traffic ranking to main English Wikipedia site - lower is better, 1 is theoretically the most popular site on the Internet. Use this link to update this table: use the "1 wk. avg" figure to eliminate the effect of the weekly cyclic variation in Wikipedia traffic.

22 October 2002: 9653
27 October 2002: 9440
3 November 2002: 9047
13 November 2002: 8356
22 November 2002: 7922
1 December 2002: 7543
10 January 2003: 14882 (slight slip: Alexa site shows major traffic dip around this time)
1 February 2003: 7897 (recovering again)
7 February 2003: 6799 (woo hoo!)
15 February 2003: 5406
23 Feburary 2003: 5228
4 March 2003: 7328
11 March 2003: 5713
13 March 2003: 4735 seems to be from boost in Google ranking
15 March 2003: 3662
17 March 2003: 3342
28 March 2003: 3653
6 April 2003: 3072
12 April 2003: 3444
16 April 2003: 3785
28 April 2003: 3422
6 May 2003: 3832
18 May 2003: 3212
22 May 2003: 2965
29 May 2003: 2509 (possibly driven by Earthlink E-mail newsletter publicity)
16 June 2003: 3289
23 June 2003: 3187
2 July 2003: 2676
13 July 2003: 2033
17 July 2003: 2045
8 August 2003: 1406
2 October 2003: 941
21 October 2003: 1038
29 October 2003: 1189 recent reduction in rank probably due to server problems
3 November 2003: 1168
13 November 2003: 906 performance is better after load-balancing installed
25 November 2003: 934 ranking continues to be around 1000 +/- 100
3 December 2003: 950 but new server has been installed, so expect better ranking soon?
6 December 2003: 887
8 December 2003: 838
12 December 2003: 828
15 December 2003: 751

Alexa reach measurement for wikipedia.org

Alexa reach per million viewers: (reach figures can be found at the bottom of the Alexa page cited above: use the one-week average figure, please).

7 February 2003 : 125
15 February 2003 : 155
23 February 2003 : 125
15 March 2003 : 210
28 March 2003 : 265
12 April 2003 : 285
16 April 2003 : 270
6 May 2003: 360
18 May 2003: 300
29 May 2003: 330
16 June 2003: 330
2 July 2003: 420
13 July 2003: 530
17 July 2003: 530
8 August 2003: 665
2 October 2003: 905
21 October 2003: 990
3 November 2003: 880
13 November 2003: 910
25 November 2003: 950
3 December 2003: 945
6 December 2003: 1,010
8 December 2003: 1,050
12 December 2003: 1,050
15 December 2003: 1,070