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| Version | User | Scope of changes |
|---|---|---|
| Jan 22 2009, 9:59 PM EST (current) | editme | 8 words added, 1 word deleted |
| Jul 9 2008, 11:51 PM EDT | Anonymous | 1 word added, 1 word deleted |
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Welcome to wiki.wetpaint.com, the wiki where you can talk about wikis. Yes, that's right: wikis. Don't know what a wiki is? Well, neither do 84% of U.S. Internet users, according to a July 2007 poll by polling company Harris Interactive for wetpaint.com, aka wikisphere.com. If 84% of U.S. Internet users don't know what a wiki is, then you can bet that the percentage is even higher in the U.S. population as a whole, since not everyone uses the Internet. You can also bet that the percentage is higher in most other industrialized countries, since the U.S. is among the most Internet-friendly.
Now why is this important? Because according to alexa.com the eighth most visited Web site is, yes, a wiki. What's the name of that wiki? Wikipedia. You've probably heard about it, since according to a comScore study 26% of U.S. Internet users visited Wikipedia at least once during July 2007 alone. And that's one month only.
Now why is Wikipedia important to you, the Internet user? Because except for Russia and Czechia (the Czech Republic), the search engine called Google is the Web search market share leader in every country in North America and the whole of Europe, according to an August 2007 article on The Economist about Google. According to the same article, this is also true for every country in Asia except for Japan, South Korea and China.
What does Google have to do with Wikipedia? It's that most of the time you enter a technical term in Google, a result from Wikipedia shows up in the first search engine results page (SERP). Wikipedia, in turn, gets about three fifths of its inbound traffic from Google, according to Internet statistics company Hitwise.
What does this have to do with wikis? Since only 16% of U.S. Internet users know what a wiki is, but a much higher percentage of them have read content created on Wikipedia, either on Wikipedia itself or one of its many mirroring Web sites, this means many people, probably more than half of Wikipedia content readers, don't know that Wikipedia is a wiki, and thus they don't know how Wikipedia content is created. If you don't know how Wikipedia content is created, then you also don't know how to estimate its reliability.
What's the hyperonym for Wikipedia that most people think of first? It's encyclopedia, not wiki. Why? Because Wikipedia's slogan mentions the word encyclopedia, not wiki. And most people, unfortunately, believe in that slogan: They think Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, despite the fact that it's not edited by encyclopedists as we know them but by laymen, who don't know the ABCs of encyclopedism.encyclopedism (yes, that's a word - I checked).
Now why is this important? Because according to alexa.com the eighth most visited Web site is, yes, a wiki. What's the name of that wiki? Wikipedia. You've probably heard about it, since according to a comScore study 26% of U.S. Internet users visited Wikipedia at least once during July 2007 alone. And that's one month only.
Now why is Wikipedia important to you, the Internet user? Because except for Russia and Czechia (the Czech Republic), the search engine called Google is the Web search market share leader in every country in North America and the whole of Europe, according to an August 2007 article on The Economist about Google. According to the same article, this is also true for every country in Asia except for Japan, South Korea and China.
What does Google have to do with Wikipedia? It's that most of the time you enter a technical term in Google, a result from Wikipedia shows up in the first search engine results page (SERP). Wikipedia, in turn, gets about three fifths of its inbound traffic from Google, according to Internet statistics company Hitwise.
What does this have to do with wikis? Since only 16% of U.S. Internet users know what a wiki is, but a much higher percentage of them have read content created on Wikipedia, either on Wikipedia itself or one of its many mirroring Web sites, this means many people, probably more than half of Wikipedia content readers, don't know that Wikipedia is a wiki, and thus they don't know how Wikipedia content is created. If you don't know how Wikipedia content is created, then you also don't know how to estimate its reliability.
What's the hyperonym for Wikipedia that most people think of first? It's encyclopedia, not wiki. Why? Because Wikipedia's slogan mentions the word encyclopedia, not wiki. And most people, unfortunately, believe in that slogan: They think Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, despite the fact that it's not edited by encyclopedists as we know them but by laymen, who don't know the ABCs of encyclopedism.encyclopedism (yes, that's a word - I checked).
