Blog Links to Wikipedia Soar

Posted on September 28, 2005

Analysis by Blogpulse.com has found that bloggers are linking to Wikipedia with increasing frequency. Blogpulse.com's findings reveal that links to Wikipedia soared following the London bombing in July and Hurricane Katrina's devastating impact in August and September. BlogPulse.com says blog references to Wikipedia tripled after Katrina made landfall. Here are some of the reason's BlogPulse.com gives for the spike in Wikipedia citation by bloggers.

Influential, top blog authors are embedding Wikipedia links in their blog postings, exposing the site to wider audiences. A half-percent of all blog posts at BlogPulse.com, in fact, now typically cite Wikipedia.

Major news events, especially July's London subway bombings and Hurricane Katrina in August-September, boosted Wikipedia's use as a source of immediate and thorough background. As a result, Wikipedia has emerged as more reliable and timely than other encyclopedias or knowledge databases.

The rise of Consumer-Generated Media. Because Wikipedia involves thousands of collaborative authors and contributors, many of them are passionate about accuracy and focused, thoughtful usage, increasing the level of trust among users.

International appeal. Of the growing number of foreign-language Wikipedias (French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Dutch & Swedish), blog citations to the German-language Wikipedia increased the most, nearly doubling in the past six months.

BlogPulse.com also provides a graph showing the increase in Wikipedia citations by bloggers over the past few months. They also say that bloggers now refer to Wikipedia more than they do to traditional encyclopedias.

Blog references to Wikipedia have tripled, in fact, since Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast in late August. More than twice as many bloggers now refer to the term "Wikipedia" as they do to the traditional "encyclopedia," and bloggers mention Wikipedia six times more frequently than they mention Encyclopedia Britannica's web site.

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