According to an article in the BBC, Cancer Research UK is asking its specialists to write new content for Wikipedia in order to increase the accuracy and clarity of the entries supplied on the online encyclopaedia.

Wikipedia is the 12th most popular website in the UK and accounts for just under 1% of all visits to websites made by UK Internet users. The site is a fantastic resource of information, and is frequently a first port of call for inquisitive browsers online.
In the last 12 weeks there were over 65,000 different search variations that included the word ‘cancer’ typed into search engines monitored by us here at Hitwise. Over 4,500 websites received traffic from those 65,000 cancer-related search terms, of which Wikipedia was the fourth most popular, receiving 4.38% of the search clicks.

Although Cancer Research UK actually receives more clicks than Wikipedia overall for all searches relating to cancer, this doesn’t take into account the fact that some of those searches will be navigational searches for ‘cancer research uk’ or similar terms. On top of that, Cancer Research UK receives 40% of its clicks from paid links, whereas Wikipedia receives its traffic almost exclusively from organic clicks.
In the eyes of the UK Internet population, Wikipedia is an authority on cancer. We can illustrate this better by using our Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Positions tool. For this example I’ve chosen the search term ‘breast cancer’. SERP Positions shows not only the percentage of search clicks each website received for that search term but also the position the website was ranked in the top search engines (I’ve concentrated on Google UK here).

You can see that the UK charity Breast Cancer Care receives the most clicks for searches for ‘breast cancer’ and it also occupies the number one organic position in the Google Rankings. Wikipedia receives less traffic than BreastCancer.org but it occupies the number two spot in the Google rankings because BreastCancer.org receives 27% of its traffic from paid links. Cancer Research UK is the fourth biggest recipient of traffic from the term ‘breast cancer’ but is not given a Google ranking.

You can see from the table above that Cancer Research UK pays for nearly 92% of its traffic for the term ‘breast cancer’ which is why the site is not given a ranking on the SERP Positions table. What SERP Positions also allows us to do is see the exact landing pages that are receiving traffic from a particular search term:

In this case, the Wikipedia page that is the second highest ranked in Google UK for the term ‘breast cancer’ was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer giving the experts at Cancer Research the ideal starting point from which to share their knowledge on the subject.
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