Cite PEW's recent detailed data on Wikipedia which challenge Citizendium

Some links could stand replacement with more recent data and several points could be strengthened with more detailed data.

Usage

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.

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?

1. Ease and speed of content creation drive relevance for popular searches

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.

This is huge -- the Citizendium model of vetted content creation will disappoint many of the most popular searches for what's new, what's interesting right now

2. Google loves links and Wikipedia has far more links than most any other reference site

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.

Wikipedia's headstart over Citizendium poses a huge challenge not to be lightly dismissed, given their differences in content creation velocity

3. Convenience far more important than accuracy, since Wikipedia is not only source people use -- see links, above

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,3 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.

Note that accuracy and convenience tradeoffs of a statistically valid sample of Wikipedia users are diametrically opposed to Larry Sanger's assumptions.

Source: "Wikipedia Users" Data Memo by Lee Rainie, Director of PEW / Internet & American Life Project and Bill Tancer, General Manager of Global
Research at Hitwise1. April 24, 2007. http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/212/report_display.asp

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