Google & Other Search Engines Dominate Traffic Drivers To Wikipedia

When writing about
Powerset this week, I covered how its hopes to gain Wikipedia users was
complicated by the fact that Wikipedia itself gets so many people from search,
rather than direct navigation.
New stats (PDF)
from Nielsen Online reaffirm this — four of the five top referring sites to
Wikipedia are search engines, with Google by far the leader.

Here’s the rundown on top referring sites that generate home users from the
US, for April 2008:

To explain further, the chart above shows that 61 percent of people who were
referred to Wikipedia in some way came from Google. And top sites that generate
work users:

All that traffic Google sends to Wikipedia is one reason that many suspect
Google would like to have its own Wikipedia alternative.
Google Knol – Google’s
Play To Aggregate Knowledge Pages covers more about this, though that
particular project has yet to happen.