Wikipedia Reaches Traffic Success

The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia announced this week increase in popularity, recorded by Alexa.com. Wikipedia's traffic continues to rise at an unprecedented rate, announced the organization.

"Alexa's traffic rank for Wikipedia has risen to a weekly average of 77, with a one-day rank of 66. From wondering whether Wikipedia would ever get into the list of top 100 websites, we are now in a situation where breaking into the top 50 is now a realistic prospect," the company said.

Since its launch in 2001, the popularity of Wikipedia has continued to grow. Today Wikipedia is one of the 100 most visited Web sites, according to Alexa.com Internet Traffic Rankings.

Yahoo! announced recently it will help support the Wikipedia project, providing the open source encyclopaedia initiative with servers and bandwidth. In exchange Yahoo will be on the inside track to index and search the Wikipedia content.

"Yahoo! Search's support and vast user base will provide critical material aid and global reach for Wikipedia," said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikipedia is a Web-based, free-content encyclopedia that is written collaboratively by volunteers. It consists of 195 independent language editions sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

According the statistics published on the site, Wikipedia contains approximately 1.5 million articles, over 500,000 of which are in its English language edition, over 200,000 in the German language and over 100,000 in the Japanese language.

According to Reuters, the founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, Jimmy Wales, had also been talking to Google about possible support. Of course the major search engines are currently competing hard over possible new services, and access to the encyclopaedic content has obviously attracted Yahoo! in the search for a new edge.

Search will dedicate hardware and resources to support Wikipedia, a community based encyclopedia written and edited by people from around the world.

In addition, Wikipedia content will become available to hundreds of millions of users worldwide through Yahoo! Search via shortcuts that are automatically displayed above the relevant search results.