Alex Mindlin of the New York Times "Drilling Down" column today writes about the growing popularity of the Wikipedia. Alex and I talked for a bit last week regarding the growing tendency of bloggers to embed targeted links to Wikipedia definitions in their blog entries. Quoting some of our data, he notes, "Wikipedia is consistently used by bloggers - about twice as often as
the term "encyclopedia" - and showed up in roughly one out of every 600
blog posts last month; it was one of every 3,300 posts in October 2004." As noted in an Intelliseek release back in September, a number of key factors are driving Wikipedia growth, including:
- Influential, top blog authors are embedding Wikipedia links in their blog postings, exposing the site to wider audiences.
- Major news events, especially July's London subway bombings, Hurricane Katrina, and the Supreme Court nominations. Wikipedia is emerging as a source of immediate and thorough background - more reliable and timely than other encyclopedias or knowledge databases.
- The rise of Consumer-Generated Media. Because Wikipedia involves thousands of collaborative authors and contributors, many of them are passionate about accuracy and focused, thoughtful usage, increasing the level of trust among users.
- International appeal. Of the growing number of foreign-language
Wikipedias (French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Polish,
Portuguese, Dutch & Swedish), blog citations to the German-language
Wikipedia increased the most, nearly doubling in the past six months.
Lastly, as I noted to Mindlin in the story, there's the credibility factor: "For bloggers, it's almost like a badge of credibility to embed Wikipedia in their blog references. There's something about Wikipedia that confers a degree of respectability, because multiple Web users have converged on it." At the end of the day, we're all looking to maximize credibility. As a blogger, I quote Wikipedia constantly, versus other sources, because I have higher confidence that the real-time "group definition" is closer to the truth than a time-stamped old definition.
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