Quick Study: How Many Articles Did It Take for Wikipedia to Become Famous?
This is far from a scientific answer to that question, but I was curious about the relationship between the growth of Wikipedia and its prominence in the news. Fortunately, Wikipedia tracks its official article count in every language. Using a snapshot of the number of articles in English each quarter, I noted (a) the number of times “Wikipedia” appeared in the New York Times throughout the previous three months and (b) the normed Google search volume. The graph represents the fraction of each series’ maximum (i.e., for Wikipedia Articles 1=1.4M, for NYT Mentions 1=90 and Google Trends is already a relative quantity).
NYT mentions Wikipedia a few times recently after its inception in 2001. Until 2004–2005 it references Wikipedia in a variety of business and technology articles, but always follows the mention with an explanatory clause. Finally, by 2006 Wikipedia is understood unassisted and used as a stereotype for emerging social information websites. As the Wikipedia article count approaches and surpasses 1M, quarterly NYT mentions shoot into the 80s, possibly fueled by the Britannica/Wikipedia feud. The trend has been generally upward, but I have to imagine that NYT reportage will have to flatten and eventually fall, probably once Wikipedia becomes so pervasive as to become uninteresting.
Google Trends shows that even though NYT/Wikipedia critical mass didn’t occur until approximately 1M articles, people were googling “Wikipedia” once it had a few hundred thousand articles (there’s no data before 2004, but the numbers don’t start moving until 2005 anyway). The search volume has since increased to match Wikipedia’s supposed utility (let’s assume more articles equal more information). I’m expecting a huge dip once everyone figures out how to add Wikipedia to the Bookmarks Bar (or realizes that Firefox let’s you add Wikipedia to the search bar).
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