Wikipedia is now the 14th most visited websites in the UK and the 5th largest recipient of traffic from search engines. The social encyclopedia’s success, combined with the popularity of wikis in general, has led an explosion in the number of websites using either the ‘wiki’ or ‘pedia’ approach to a range of topics.
In order to quantify this trend we created a custom category of over a hundred sites that include either ‘wiki’ or ‘pedia’ in their name. Here are the top 10 based on market share of UK Internet visits during January. (Note that our category excludes sites published by the Wikimedia foundation, any genuine ‘normal’ encyclopedias, and all Expedia properties).

The top 10 list includes a range of sites, covering retail, technology and entertainment. Games are well represented in the top 10 with the World of Warcraft and Fallout wikis, and there are quite a few further down the list as well. However, it is information sites that receive most traffic: wikiHow is at number 3 and WikiAnswers tops the list with almost a third of visits to the category. Traffic to WikiAnswers has trebled over the last 12 months but, as the chart below illustrates, it still lags behind the answers market leader, Yahoo! Answers.

Returning to our ‘wiki’ and ‘pedia’ sites, traffic to the custom category increased by 138% between January 2008 and January 2009. However, as the chart below illustrates, the original remains the best; last month Wikipedia received five times as many visits as all of its ‘wiki’ and ‘pedia’ imitators combined.

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