Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-03-01/News and notes

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• That's a remarkably fast fall, from #5 most visited website to #13 in 7 months. Does that includes mobile views? I wonder if Alexa changed the way they gauge popularity over the past year. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:24, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Comparing the two Alexa Top 500 Global lists, the newcomers are Tmall and Login.tmall.com, QQ.com (Tencent QQ), Sohu, Taobao, 360.cn (360 Safeguard), JD.com. My guess this is not a methodology change, but genuine increase in Chinese consumer activity on the Internet. ☆ Bri (talk) 20:37, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Well, if they are being newly added to Alexa's survey of sites, I guess this "sudden" fall is not so surprising. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:43, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

That's not what I meant. I meant the newcomers to the spots above Wikipedia. China had something like 50 million new Internet users last year [1]. That kind of growth will show up in Alexa. ☆ Bri (talk) 20:54, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I understand how many internet users they are in China but Wikipedia was at #5, #6 or #7 for over a decade. It's surprising, at least to me, to fall so far practically overnight. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:50, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Well, 'fall' is a questionable manner in which to describe the change, insofar as the actual number of people using the encyclopedia has not diminished (at least not appreciably) and its ranking remains the same in almost all regions. All that has changed is that there are new major services in China and a significant number of new users in that market as well (where Wikipedia is incidentally unreachable as a technical matter). But the figures (in terms of real numbers) have not really changed and Wikipedia remains roughly as popular as it has been over recent years. Frankly, the byline is a little misleading, bordering on click-bait-ish; it really ought to read "Immersion of major new Chinese social media sites drops Wikipedia's relative ranking on Alexa" or something along those lines. The existing wording of the byline suggest an absolute drop in traffic and even the language that follows fails to appropriately clarify what is going on here. Snow ^{let's rap} 12:20, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

• It's also sad to hear about Wikimedia Space. It sounded so promising when I first heard about it...a forum where editors from different projects could gather and communicate other than Meta. I thought it would be a great place to direct those editors from other language Wikipedias who show up at AN looking for help. Sorry they threw the towel in so soon. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:43, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Quite disappointed to hear the setback in Alex's rankings but the worse thing we will witness in the future is the speculations over closing of Wikipedia market in India. It will even cause a significant drop in Alexa rankings and Indian government ruling BJP has planned to follow strict data protection policies ever since the Citizenship Amendment Act protests. I personally believe Indian government purposefully wanted to shut down Wikipedia because Wikipedia has huge collection of information about Citizenship protests and also recently the North East Delhi riots article seems to have caused headaches to ruling BJP. The author of North East Delhi riots article User:DBigXray faced criticisms and political attacks for providing accurate information about the protests by maintaining neutral point of view. We need to protect our valuable Wikipedia editors from these attacks. Abishe (talk) 19:14, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

• Not really suprising that Wikipedia is blocked in China, they block a lot of stuff there they don't find picture perfect for their ideology. I believe there was a skirmish with the Chinese and the article on Taiwan in the past. dibbydib ^💬/_✏ 22:56, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

• "it does not appear in the top 50 in China where access to Wikipedia is blocked" is a bit of a non-comment. Because Wikipedia is blocked in China, any traffic from China would've come via VPNs in other countries. For what it's worth Wikipedia may well have been the #1 website in China and Alexa won't include it in their statistics because all that traffic would appear to have come from other countries. Deryck C. 15:53, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

But VPN adds another layer to accessing Wikipedia. It is like anti-theft devices. They are made to frustrate ordinary people long enough to give up and seek alternatives. In China there are alternatives (i.e. Baidu's Baike) to Wikipedia, even if they are being censored. We wouldn't ever know what would have been the true traffic as such, even if somehow Alexa manages to know that the users are from China behind a VPN. robertsky (talk) 03:08, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Widespread transclusion of Wikipedia content is undoubtedly a major contributing factor to the statistical decline as well. We have reached a point where everything from Google searches to Windows Start Menu queries and Smart TVs and mobile phones all include cached summaries or versions of articles. We should get more aggregate data from public surveys and major organizations like Google and Facebook, but you can bet that the real rate of access is far beyond Alexa's take.   — C M B J   03:41, 26 May 2020 (UTC)