[Foundation-l] Outdated manual

Sun Apr 10 23:56:58 UTC 2011

2011/4/9 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>:
> May someone update manual in which it is written that Wikipedia is the
> fifth site by traffic? For the most of 2010 and whole 2011 it has varied
> between 6th and 8th place [1].

WMF sites are the fifth popular web property in the world according to
comScore, where "web properties" are all sites operated by a single
entity. Indeed, WP by itself would still be -- as of February, 376M
out of 379M uniques go to Wikipedia.org; there's substantial audience
overlap with the other sites, the largest of which is Wiktionary.org
with 10.4M uniques

So, it's equally accurate to say that Wikipedia is the fifth most
popular web property (as stated e.g. in
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1c/Key_Facts_wikipedia_March_2011.pdf
). It's inaccurate to say it is the fifth most popular website when
using the common definition of website as a collection of
documents/services provided from a single domain name, which is why I
would prefer for us to consistently use "web property", even though
it's a less common term.

The link Nemo provided is worth reading re: limitations of the comScore data:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Stu/comScore_data_on_Wikimedia#Limitations

For internal analysis, internal data is much preferable, but for
communication where we're situated relative to the rest of the web,
comScore is, as Sue stated, the industry standard.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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