The free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, has surprisingly lost more than 10 percent of its global page views in 2013. The decline is equivalent to about 2 billion page views between December 2012 and December 2013.
The online encyclopedia’s most popular versions including the English Wikipedia version’s page views declined by 12 percent, those of German version went down by 17 percent and the Japanese version by around 9 percent.
While errors in counting might be the reason leading to declining pageviews as per Wikipedia mangers, other experts are of the opinion that Google’s Knowledge Graphs project launched in 2013 might have led to gobbling up of Wikipedia users.
On the other hand, Wikipedia’s Indian version seems to be growing more popular among users with a 34 percent increase in Hindi page views, 46 percent increase in Bengali page views and 36 percent increase in Malayalam page views. Marathi and Telugu page views increased to 4 percent and 1 percent respectively. The Tamil page views however dropped down by 11 percent.
According to data published by the independent tracker, comScore, Wikipedia which was launched in 2001 have grown to become world’s sixth most visited website, with 523 million unique visitors recorded last year.
Jay Walsh, adviser to Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit California based foundation that manages Wikipedia, in an interview with the Times of India said that though he agrees that page views might have indeed declined; there can be chances that the data “may contain significant anomalies”.
“There is a possibility this fluctuation is due to how our servers record mobile traffic data or how certain applications may be accessing our data. We will not make any conclusive statements about the cause of these page-view fluctuations until a thorough review is complete”, he added.
[Source: The Economic Times]
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