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.

Monthly count of Usenet posts containing the word "Wikipedia"

Source: Google

File:Usenet posts mentioning wikipedia graph sep 2002.png

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

This is the search used: [1]

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

A couple of other metrics might be useful:

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: 1 (dropped from Google index)

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

Google incoming links to main Wikipedia homepage (use link:www.wikipedia.org at Google)

22 October 2002 : 244
3 November 2002 : 2060 (google only updates the statistics every few weeks)
13 November 2002: 2060
22 November 2002: 2060
1 December 2002: 2170
10 January 2003: 2060 (maybe they changed their calculation method?)
1 February 2003: 2340

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

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