Talk.Wiki Popularity

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SUGGESTION: Add two columns to the table: 1. a column for a link to the actual google search that was used; 2. an "As of" column for the date when the search was performed. --DavidBooth

Seems that the Alexa column is not sorted properly? -- RadomirDopieralski

Yah; it's because it contains non-numbers, so it gets sorted as a set of strings, not as a set of numbers... -- JanneJalkanen

I turned all the Alexa ranks into numbers, even if that means it turns into non-sensical data and moved the star warning that the data is not accurate to the wiki engine column. -- ChuckSmith

Is someone regularly updating this page? Wikkawiki is not included in the list. There are currently 880000 Google Results for Wikka (please note Wikka is often referred to as Wikka Wiki—two distinct words—hence the query I used to calculate these results: +wikka +wiki) and the domain wikkawiki.org has an Alexa traffic rank of 109,930. If no one is actively mantaining this table, I'll go on and add this entry myself -- DarioTaraborelli

Go ahead. But I think it would be fair to also update other entries then -- their ranks might have changed. -- RadomirDopieralski

I'm not sure what is listed in this table under "Google Rank"? Initially I thought it's the number of page hits for a string unique for given engine (like "MoinMoin Powered" in case of MoinMoin), but I just made some searches and the results are much lower -- I don't think they decreased so much since their collecting.

Then I thought it's just the number of page hits when just searching for the name of the wiki engine -- but again not, for example there are 144,000,000 hits for MediaWiki, while the table shows over twice this value.

Then I've gone to http://googlerankings.com/ and dicovered, that there is no way to know the rank without a key. So there is no way to update or even verify the results.

Open Source Wiki Popularity#

(Google page hits from 2007-02-14) (Did not add "wiki" to the search term - needs rework, see Talk page)

-- RadomirDopieralski, 2007-02-14

I just went to Google and typed the name of the search engine plus the word "wiki" without any quotes. Maybe not the most scientific method, but it gives you a pretty good idea of how popular wiki engines are. In the new table, did you also compare the Google results with the other wikis from WikiMatrix, because some of those are probably more popular than those in the current list?

-- ChuckSmith, 2007-Feb-20

You should keep in mind that for example "MoinMoin" also means "G'day" or "Hello" in northern Germany, so we tried to avoid those ambiguities by adding the "wiki" word to every search term, e.g. "Mediawiki wiki".

-- ChristophSauer, 2007-Feb-20

Well, I searched for the exact term that is mentioned in the tables -- enclosed in quotes. I figured out that most of the terms are pretty unique in their spelling. "Moin moin" is indeed a greeting, but "MoinMoin" surely isn't. It is also possible to estimate the amount of actual wiki sites running specific wiki engine and indexed by Google, by searching for some characteristic string. In case of MoinMoin the characteristic string is "MoinMoin powered" and it gives 1160000 hits. I didn't check for other engines from WikiMatrix, I only added Oddmuse to the table out of curiosity.

I don't think we really need an exact ranking of wiki engines. Of course, there is this intuition that popular markup is probably in some ways better -- but that's not really true in case of wiki engines, which are usually chosen according to different criteria.

-- RadomirDopieralski, 2007-02-20

But what is the characteristic string? What if a page is used quite frequently in intranets or on an "USB Stick" like TiddlyWiki? Adding "wiki" to the search term at least gives you also discussions and talk about a wiki engine, and would exclude sites that do talk about something else. With "MoinMoin" I still get other results like "MoinMoin Schatzi!" (Hello Darling). We should at least stick with one solution and do not mix different aproaches. It was our fault not to document this better here. Sorry for that.

-- ChristophSauer, 2007-02-20

As I noted in my previous comment (fourth paragraph of this page), WikkaWiki is often referred to as Wikka Wiki—two distinct words—or simply as Wikka so the current statistics reported in the Feb 20 table for WikkaWiki are substantially wrong. A search from google.co.uk for +wikka +wiki done today, gives 914,000 results thus putting Wikka at the 13th, not the 32nd position. (there is some slight difference in these figures between local Google servers, so this should be doublechecked from the location from which data for the original table were taken) Can the author of the WikiPopularity table please take this into account and update the table accordingly? Or let me know if I should fix it myself? Thanks!

-- DarioTaraborelli, 2007-02-20

Please enter the correct value and maybe add a remark that it was measured on a different date. Or, if you want to avoid the mess, just redo the whole table with today's results.

This list is more of a general orientation tool, not a precise instrument. As far as I can tell, the Wikka's markup is pretty "ordinary", maybe apart from using tildes for indentation, so there is not much fear that Creole will differ a lot from it or introduce very obnoxious conflicts (I can see that tilde as an escape character would be a big problem, though).

-- Radomir Dopieralski, 2007-Mar-15

Dario's comment is already a month old and on that date I updated the table to reflect the current popularities of websites (according to Google) on that date.

-- Chuck Smith, 2007-Mar-16

Oh, sorry, it reapperance in the RecentChanges confused me :)

-- Radomir Dopieralski, 2007-Mar-16

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There's another new interesting way to find out about wiki popularity, as I learned today: The Yahoo Tech Buzz Game.

The Tech Buzz Game is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends

There's one for wikis too: http://buzz.research.yahoo.com/bk/market/market.html?_mid=62992

--ChristophSauer 2007-April-07