New worldwide rankings show Wikipedia strength outside US
Recent data from companies tracking global Internet use continues to rank Wikipedia highly, and its appeal outside the United States is driving those rankings even higher as those companies do a better job of accounting for the worldwide audience. However, some of this information suggests that Wikipedia's penetration in parts of Asia has been much weaker.
One of several companies that regularly reports on surveys of Internet use, comScore Networks, debuted a new global survey last week that ranked Wikipedia sites as having the seventh-largest number of visitors worldwide. Previous reports from comScore, as well as its competitors, have typically focused only on visitors from the United States. The new report credited Wikipedia sites with 131,949,000 unique visitors in March, indicating that 19% of the global audience visited at some point.
This ranking for Wikipedia is noticeably higher than most previous estimates for a variety of reasons. One is that Wikipedia's popularity is frequently greater outside the U.S., as is also indicated by the recent addition of country-by-country data from Alexa Internet. Another reason is that comScore's report, unlike Alexa, consolidates a number of sites into groups based on their parent company. Thus Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google, each of which has multiple sites ranked ahead of Wikipedia according to Alexa, only appear once on comScore's list. Meanwhile, Wikipedia presumably also benefits from the addition of traffic going to sister projects. Finally, comScore does not show any independent Chinese sites, several of which rank ahead of Wikipedia on Alexa, although it does report that China has the world's second-largest Internet population.