An article appeared recently that mentioned Hitwise data in reference to Wikipedia and the New York Times. Indeed, Wikipedia recently eclipsed the New York Times in terms of market share of Internet visits as shown in the chart below. But is Wikipedia taking over as a news site? Let’s see:

Wikipedia gets most of its traffic from organic search results – 71% for the week ending October 1, 2005. In fact, it ranks number 9 among all sites visited directly after Google. The terms driving visits to the site vary widely – the list of the top 20 terms driving visits to the site shows news events, entertainment events and people, historical queries, and some very general terms like “metaphor.” There are not many news terms except for those related to Hurricane Katrina. What’s interesting is that if you enter many of these terms into Google or Yahoo!, the organic result for Wikipedia shows up toward the bottom of the page, which points to the Wikipedia brand equity as a reliable source of information about a topic.

Now, about the New York Times – how does it get its traffic? Only 12.6% of its upstream traffic came from search engines for the week ending Oct. 1, 2005, and 16% came from email – likely from their daily emails. A large portion, 32%, comes from other News and Media sites, of which the leading ones are Drudge Report (6.3% of upstream visits), Google News (2.76%) and Yahoo! News (2.2%).
In the case of a news event, like Hurricane Katrina, where the story is updating rapidly, we’ve seen Wikipedia play an important role. It was the number 3 site getting visits from the term “hurricane katrina” (after Google News and the NOAA National Hurricane Center during the height of the event (4 weeks ending Sept. 24, 2005). We also saw a similar phenomenon during the Indian Ocean tsunami. Wikipedia is a great place to go to get background information on an event or person that has recently entered the news, and its users recognize this. But I don’t think it’s going to take the place of top news sites like The New York Times or Google News. I’d like to hear opinions on the use of Wikipedia for news, and if you think other online news providers should be worried.