Pew: 1/3 of US Online Adults Consult Wikipedia

According to a new report (PDF) from the Pew Center for the American Life Project, some one-third of online Americans (36% to be exact) regularly consult Wikipedia. This reflects 8% of the broader population.

Drilling down further, Wikipedia is more popular among the well-educated. Some 50% of those with at least a college degree consult the site, compared with 22% of those with a high school diploma. Pew also looked at demographics: 44% of Americans ages 18-29 use Wikipedia to look for information, while just 29% of users age 50 and up.

The Pew Report also includes fresh data from Hitwise that reveals just how popular Wikipedia is and how Google and search engines factor in.

Comments

[David Lee King]

Not 1/3 of Americans, like the title of your post states, but 1/3 of ONLINE Americans - a lower number.

Just an fyi...

[Phil Gomes]

Drilling down further, Wikipedia is more
popular among the well-educated.

That's good, 'cause the well-educated would be more likely to be critical, spot things like vanity content and, most importantly, recognize that Wikipedia is more of a good (excellent, even) starting point rather than anything that comes remotely close to a canonical resource.

Had Wikipedia been popular when I was guest-lecturing at SFSU, I probably would have rejected it if I saw it in students' citations.

[James Joyner]

My guess is that college educated people are more likely to be intellectually curious enough to look things up than their less-educated counterparts.

[Neil Sanderson]

Hi Steve: You say 36% of online Americans "regularly" consult Wikipedia, but I wonder if that's right. The question asked by Pew was "Do you ever use the internet to consult Wikipedia?" So use of Wikipedia is not tied to any specific frequency that would suggest regular use, and could even be one-off, could it not?

Also you say Wikipedia users are 8% of "the broader population". Is that your own calculation? I don't see it anywhere in the Pew summary. They do say, however, that on a typical day 8% of online adult Americans visit Wikipedia. Is that what you meant?

Cheers

[David Scott Lewis]

Of course, if Encyclopedia Britannica was free, watch how the numbers for Wikipedia would change. It would still be used, especially for obscure topics, but EB would replace it for most topics. Even some reporters are now being barred from using Wikipedia as a source due to its unreliability.