Recently many have noted that Wikipedia articles show up on the first page of hits in the big search engines (samples: Nicholas Carr, myself.)
g. (a.k.a. Jure Cuhalev, according to Wikipedia Signpost), checked the tendency more thoroughly by reviewing 1.000 randomly selected Wikipedia article names as search queries in Google, Yahoo and MSN. And found that Wikipedia appeared in the top 10 of 81 percent of searches using Google. In Yahoo 77 percent and 38 percent for MSN.
Criticism of the methodology used has been uttered, along the lines that choosing Wikipedia article names would skew the results. Using real search queries would have been better, the argument goes. Just as a five minute follow-up on this I tried to do just that – testing real search queries from the Norwegian search site Kvasir. They publish a toplist, a list of the most popular queries hourly and for a 24-hour period. I took those from between 14.00 and 15.00 (CET) today, and checked them in Google (using the .no-domain version). Results:
1. finn.no (no Wikipedia hit)
2. sjokolade (number 1,2,6)
3. telefonkatalogen (-)
4. finn (8)
5. diamant (-)
6. google (-)
7. elkjøp (2)
8. kjersti (8,9)
9. vg (8)
10. magerøya (1,10)
So in six out of ten of these queries, Wikipedia results were in the top ten. The queries are maybe a typical mix of company names, geography, shopping items etc. As has often been pointed out, many people search for a very well known site in a search engine instead of typing the URL in the browser (see Google(!), Finn.no and VG here).
Anyway, this little informal test seems to strengthen the argument put forward by Nature in an editorial last year – scientists should help improve Wikipedia, exactly because it’s such a highly used knowledge resource:
Select a topic close to your work and look it up on Wikipedia. If the entry contains errors or important omissions, dive in and help fix them. It need not take too long. And imagine the pay-off: you could be one of the people who helped turn an apparently stupid idea into a free, high-quality global resource.
Tags: wikipedia
