WikiStu » reach

Map of Wikipedia usage worldwide

stu — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 01:27:50 +0000

Last week I did a short talk at TED on Wikipedia’s evolving impact. I’ve posted an expanded version of the slides (PDF) and want to use a few blog posts to elaborate on some of the points covered.

First point for this blog post, I was looking for a way to visualize some the great analysis Erik Zachte did recently on the geographic source of traffic to Wikipedia. A trip through Commons pointed me to a slick online mapping tool and Erik was incredibly helpful at providing me with the data I needed. Here’s the map we came up with, which represents average monthly Wikipedia page views per internet user during July, August and September of 2009:

(click on map to zoom)

Green represents countries where the average internet user viewed at least 10 pages per month. Red represents countries where the average internet user viewed less than one page per month. Erik’s analysis is based on geolocation of entries from a preliminary sample of Wikipedia server logs and on the latest estimates of Internet users per country, which for some countries are outdated so will result in overstated usage estimates. That said, it’s interesting and gives insights at a more granular level than previously available due to the lack of scalable free and open source tools like Google Analytics. The underlying data is in this worksheet for anyone who wants to review/expand/improve.

The big question for me is, “What drives the red countries?” Three possibilities come to mind:

Less developed Wikipedias in local languages
Current or historical political issues (more on this in a later post)
Slower access to our sites due to distance from Amsterdam/Tampa

What do you think is driving lower Wikipedia usage among internet users in some countries? What can/should our community do about it? Post a comment with your thoughts.

comScore January 2010 data

stu — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 08:58:07 +0000

I updated the meta page on comScore data with January 2010 information. It’s been a while since I updated this analysis, mostly since Erik Zachte’s great Wikimedia Report Card covers most of the data far more elegantly.

I did include a first cut of the percentage of visitors to the largest language Wikipedias who actively edit, using Erik Zachte’s editor counts from WikiStats. A couple observations:

On the English Wikipedia only about .02% of the unique visitors actively edit. Put another way, that’s one-fifth of one-tenth of one percent. If you include all users who made at least one edit, it’s about fifteen times higher at one-third of one percent.
Participation rates vary widely by language version. Russian and German have comparatively high participation rights at around 0.03%, Japanese and Spanish are less than half that level, and English and French are in between around 0.02%.
I haven’t yet done the analysis on the other language Wikipedias comScore tracks, or of the ratio between total and active editors. I put together a summary of comScore’s trend data by project for the past few years (PDF on meta or Excel format) if anyone wants to run with it.

comScore March 2009 data

stu — Mon, 04 May 2009 13:54:47 +0000

I updated the comScore data page with March 2009 information. Other changes include setting up archives for old data. I’ll be revising this page much less frequently now as Erik Zachte’s great Wikimedia Report Card covers most of the data in a much more elegant format.

UPDATE: moved to archive page.

comScore February 2009 data

stu — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:03:47 +0000

I updated the comScore data page with February 2009 information. I also finally added tables for each of the different data sections, which should improve readability.

UPDATE: moved to archive page.

Stats on reach, Google

stu — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 09:17:53 +0000

At the January Wikimedia Board of Trustees meeting in San Francisco I walked through a short presentation on comScore with additional info on international reach and on the portion of our traffic which comes from Google (PDF version, PowerPoint original). Contact me if you’d like any of the underlying data.

comScore Nov 2008 data

stu — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 03:24:30 +0000

I updated the comScore data page with November 2008 information.

UPDATE: moved to archive page.

comScore Sept 2008 data

stu — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:30:27 +0000

I updated the comScore data page with September 2008 information. comScore has made the first wave of changes we’ve suggested to improve their categorization of all of our sites/URLs, and as a result we now have some early estimates of traffic by the different language versions of Wikipedia.

UPDATE: moved to archive page.

comScore July 2008 data

stu — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 02:07:31 +0000

Josh added info for July 2008 to the comScore data page.

UPDATE: info moved to archive page.

comScore data

stu — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:02:32 +0000

One of the major online audience measurement companies, comScore, Inc., has generously donated access to its Media Metrix and World Metrix data sets to the Foundation. comScore has an opt-in panel of two million internet users around the globe and uses a range of statistical techniques to create an internally consistent portrait of the global internet audience.

One major area of work to do is reshaping the way comScore tracks our sites. It currently includes URLs that aren’t associated with the Foundation, and also is organized in a fairly haphazard way. This will take a few months to fix, but we should be able to drive much more useful info once the work is done.

I’ve started a page on meta.wikimedia.org to summarize and share the comScore data.