36% of online American adults consult Wikipedia; It is particularly popular with the well-educated and current college-age students

More than a third of American adult internet users (36%) consult the citizen-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia, according to a new nationwide survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And on a typical day in the winter of 2007, 8% of online Americans consulted Wikipedia.

There has been ongoing controversy about the reliability of articles on Wikipedia. Still, the Pew Internet Project survey shows that Wikipedia is far more popular among the well-educated than it is among those with lower levels of education. For instance, 50% of those with at least a college degree consult the site, compared with 22% of those with a high school diploma. And 46% of those age 18 and older who are current full- or part-time students have used Wikipedia, compared with 36% of the overall internet population.

In addition, young adults and broadband users have been among those who are earlier adopters of Wikipedia. While 44% of those ages 18-29 use Wikipedia to look for information, just 29% of users age 50 and older consult the site. In a similar split, 42% of home broadband users look for information on Wikipedia, while just 26% of home dial-up users do so.

All told, the use of Wikipedia is more popular on a typical day than some of the more prominent activities tracked by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, including online purchasing, visiting dating websites, making travel reservations, using chat rooms, and participating in online auctions.

The popularity of Wikipedia

Several Web traffic measuring firms say that Wikipedia is one of the most heavily visited sites on the internet. comScore Media Metrix, the Web traffic measuring firm, regularly says that monthly traffic to the cluster of Wikipedia sites positions them in the top 10 global sites.¹

Likewise, data from Hitwise consistently registers Wikipedia in the top 10 most popular sites on the entire Web. Moreover, in the cluster of sites that are focused on educational and reference material, Wikipedia is by far the most popular site, drawing nearly six times more traffic than the next-closest site.

Why is Wikipedia so popular?

Hitwise data suggest several reasons for the popularity of Wikipedia: First, there is the sheer amount of material on the site, covering everything from ancient history to current events and popular culture. Because authors can create and edit entries at any time and in any location, new entries about emerging tech terms, celebrities or political scandals can be published or updated within a matter of minutes. In total, Wikipedia claims over 5.3 million entries, 1.6 million of them in English.

Second, Wikipedia’s dramatic growth is strongly correlated with Americans’ affection for search engines. Over 70% of the visits to Wikipedia in the week ending March 17 came from search engines, according to Hitwise data.

Wikipedia’s article structure helps explain this. Many of the pieces in the encyclopedia are full of links to other Wikipedia articles and other material on the Web. One of the prime factors in Google’s search results algorithm is the number of links connected to a given webpage. Thus, Wikipedia’s culture of encouraging internal and external links gives Wikipedia material a shot at very high Google rankings on many keyword queries. In fact, Wikipedia has become the #1 external site visited after Google’s search page, receiving over half of its traffic from the search engine. 

Convenience is likely a big factor, too

In addition to having some logistical advantages in drawing traffic, Wikipedia is probably popular for other reasons as well. Research on other subjects by the Pew Internet Project has shown that the convenience of using sites makes a difference. In our “Science Online” report,² we found that science knowledge-seeking online is driven a lot by convenience — more so than a sense that science information online is more accurate than other sources. Convenience mattered to 71% of those seeking science information, compared with 13% of those who said using the internet gave them more accurate information. In addition, our research about seekers of science information showed that users do a lot of checking using other offline and online sources of science information beyond the sites they find easily through search engines.

This finding also mirrors work we have done about the way people get health information and get political information online. The ease of using the internet to find information quickly seems a constant for many kinds of data hunts online.

About Us

About the Pew Internet & American Life Project

The Pew Internet & American Life Project is a non-partisan, non-profit initiative of the Pew Research Center that does research on the social impact of the internet. It is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The Projects takes no position on policy issues.

The findings in this report come from a survey conducted between February 15 and March 7, 2007 among a representative sample of 2,200 adults, 18 and older.

More information about the Pew Internet Project is available at: www.pewresearch.org/pewresearch-org/internet.

About Hitwise

Hitwise is an online competitive intelligence service that provides its 1,200 global clients with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise’s patented methodology captures the anonymous online usage, search, and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. Hitwise is a privately held company headquartered in New York City and operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

Survey Questions and Methodology

February 2007 Tracking Survey

Final Topline, 3/12/07

Data for February 15 – March 7, 2007

Princeton Survey Research Associates International for the Pew Internet & American Life Project 

Sample: n = 2,200 adults 18 and older
Interviewing dates: 02.15.07 – 03.07.07

• Margin of error is plus or minus 2 percentage points for results based on total sample [n=2,200]
• Margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points for results based on internet users [n=1,492]

Q6a     Do you use the internet, at least occasionally?

Q6b     Do you send or receive email, at least occasionally?

Q7       Did you happen to use the internet YESTERDAY?

WEB1    Please tell me if you ever use the internet to do any of the following things.  Do you ever use the internet to…/Did you happen to do this yesterday, or not?³

Methodology

This report is based on the findings of a daily tracking survey on Americans’ use of the Internet. The results in this report are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates between February 15 to March 7 2007, among a sample of 2,200 adults, 18 and older.  For results based on the total sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling and other random effects is plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.  For results based Internet users (n=1,492), the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.  In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting telephone surveys may introduce some error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.

The sample for this survey is a random digit sample of telephone numbers selected from telephone exchanges in the continental United States. The random digit aspect of the sample is used to avoid “listing” bias and provides representation of both listed and unlisted numbers (including not-yet-listed numbers). The design of the sample achieves this representation by random generation of the last two digits of telephone numbers selected on the basis of their area code, telephone exchange, and bank number.

New sample was released daily and was kept in the field for at least five days. The sample was released in replicates, which are representative subsamples of the larger population. This ensures that complete call procedures were followed for the entire sample.  At least 10 attempts were made to complete an interview at sampled households. The calls were staggered over times of day and days of the week to maximize the chances of making contact with a potential respondent. Each household received at least one daytime call in an attempt to find someone at home.  In each contacted household, interviewers asked to speak with the youngest male currently at home. If no male was available, interviewers asked to speak with the youngest female at home. This systematic respondent selection technique has been shown to produce samples that closely mirror the population in terms of age and gender.  All interviews completed on any given day were considered to be the final sample for that day. The final response rate on this survey is 29.3%.

Non-response in telephone interviews produces some known biases in survey-derived estimates because participation tends to vary for different subgroups of the population, and these subgroups are likely to vary also on questions of substantive interest. In order to compensate for these known biases, the sample data are weighted in analysis. The demographic weighting parameters are derived from a special analysis of the most recently available Census Bureau’s March 2006 Annual Social and Economic Supplement. This analysis produces population parameters for the demographic characteristics of adults age 18 or older, living in households that contain a telephone. These parameters are then compared with the sample characteristics to construct sample weights. The weights are derived using an iterative technique that simultaneously balances the distribution of all weighting parameters.