Communication Projects Group/Projects/Research & Polls

This data is being collected by the ComProj's Statistical Group. If you would like to join, please contact Sandy (Wikiblue). The goal of this group is:

GOAL: Find data that will help the Wikimedia Foundation build a press kit as well as assist with communication strategy. Additionally, find studies or data that support the following claims:

a) Wikipedia is one of 5 top brands worldwide b) Wikipedia articles improve as they attract more traffic c) Wikipedia is one of 10 top websites in the world.

Information can be collected from previously created studies, or by analyzing raw data that can be obtained from our Technical Department.

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Top Web Companies by Unique Visits

Top Web companies by unique visits in May 2007

Company, Audience, Time spent

Microsoft, 118,138, 2:00:48

Google, 115,834, 1:26:25

Yahoo!, 108,413, 3:01:23

Time Warner, 103,883, 4:18:19

News Corp., 71,763, 1:55:02

eBay, 67,220, 1:42:16

InterActiveCorp, 59,328, 0:26:00

Amazon, 50,838, 0:23:09

Wikimedia Fo., 46,916, 0:18:47

Apple Computer, 44,981, 1:02:52

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings

http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=12926

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WIKIPEDIA RECEIVES HIGH PRIVACY INTERNATIONAL"S GRADE

http://www.privacyinternational.org/issues/internet/interimrankings.pdf

http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/62830.html

"Seven of the Internet companies and Web sites included in Privacy International's analysis received the second lowest grade of "substantial and comprehensive privacy threats." This group included: Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, Apple Inc., Facebook.com, Hi5.com, Reunion.com, Microsoft's Windows Live Space and Yahoo.

None of the companies or sites received Privacy International's top grade, but five rated as "generally privacy-aware." They were: BBC, eBay Inc., Last.fm, LiveJournal.com, and Wikipedia.com."

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Wikipedia Accuracy http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0702140*

Dennis Wilkinson and Bernando Huberman from the Hewlett Packard Information Dynamics Laboratory in Palo Alto, CA, in 2007 studied the editing dynamics of Wikipedia articles. They found that the best quality articles are those that have been edited often by a lot of different people. They also found that the correlation between the article quality and number of edits validates Wikipedia as a successful collaborative effort.

Their study counted the number of edits and contributors for 1,211 featured articles and compared them with the same figures for other articles on the site. (Featured articles are considered the best articles on Wikipedia for accuracy, completeness, neutrality, and style.) They found that high quality articles are edited more often, and by more people than other articles.

"Wikipedia article quality continues to increase, on average, as the number of collaborators and the number of edits increase," the researchers worte.

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Nature Study http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html* According to a study conducted by the NATURE journal in 2005, Wikipedia is a good of a source as Encyclopedia Britannica. Nature asked expert reviewers from varied disciplines to review 50 articles in each encyclopedia and evaluate them based solely on accuracy. Articles chosen for comparison involved identical subject matter and were of similar length. The result: 2.9 errors per article for Encyclopaedia Britannica versus 3.9 errors per article in Wikipedia. Additionally, Nature surveyed more than 1,000 of its own authors about their use of encyclopedias. More than 70 percent of respondents said they consult Wikipedia on scientific topics, and more than 80 percent found Wikipedia’s coverage of a topic, relevance of information, accuracy and timeliness to be "Satisfactory" or "Excellent.

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In May, Wikipedia had 46.8 million unique visitors, up 72% from June 2006, NetRatings said.http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/business/news/e3ie48bde3ff6c458aadd5dab4db9db0348