Google eating into Wikipedia page views?

[mmadhankumar]

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia used by millions around the world, lost nearly 10 per cent of its page-views last year. That's a decline of about 2 billion between December 2012 and December 2013. It's most popular versions are leading the slide: page-views of the English Wikipedia declined by 12 per cent, those of German version slid by 17 per cent and the Japanese version lost 9 per cent.

While Wikipedia's managers think that this could be due to errors in counting, other experts feel that Google's Knowledge Graphs project launched last year may be gobbling up Wikipedia users.

Indian language versions of Wikipedia are bucking the trend. Hindi page-views increased by a huge 34 per cent, Bengali by an even bigger 46 per cent and Malayalam by 36 per cent. Lesser increases were seen in Marathi (4 per cent) and Telugu (1 per cent). Only in the Tamil version have page views dipped by 11 per cent. Detailed data is available on the Wikimedia Foundation website.

Launched in 2001, Wikipedia is created and edited by readers around the world. It is the world's sixth most visited website, with 523 million unique visitors last year, according to comScore, the independent tracker.


More: Google eating into Wikipedia page views? - The Times of India