On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 1:06 PM, Joseph Reagle <joseph.2008(a)reagle.org> wrote:
On Thursday, January 13, 2011, phoebe ayers wrote:
Given how much Google juice WP has, I find it unintuitive that only "53% of adult
internet users" "use Wikipedia to look for information". I thought this low
number is perhaps people thinking this means they type the query into Wikipedia itself.
Pew is always thorough, so looking for the questions I see [1] and infer the question
was:
Thinking about your internet use overall...
Please tell me if you ever use the internet to do any of the following things. Do you ever
use the internet to [Look for information on Wikipedia] ? / Did you happen to do this
yesterday, or not?
...?
[1]:
http://pewinternet.org/Shared-Content/Data-Sets/2010/May-2010--Cell-Phones.…
This is totally anecdotal and may or may not have any basis in
reality, but I find that tons of people don't know they're using
Wikipedia when they are. They either don't recognize it, or just click
on the first search link and don't pay attention, or use a mirror that
actually has WP content.... the chances of being an internet search
engine user and not at least accidentally encountering wikipedia at
some point seem pretty low. Hard to measure that, though.
-- phoebe
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