A New York Times Article discusses the recent changes in Wikipedia editing policies for some documents and then drops a bombshell:

"The system seems to be working. Wikipedia is now the Web’s third-most-popular news and information source, beating the sites of CNN and Yahoo News, according to Nielsen NetRatings.

Judy Breck at Smartmobs (where I also contribute) frames the the New York Times article about Wikipedia as the Evolution of Reputation (after Howard Rheingold’s modern classic book Smart Mobs which you can buy here) because the lastest editing policy affects the reputation (and the ability to edit that reputation).

From a Web Metrics perspective (which is what Webmetricsguru is about) let’s look at some web and search behavior stats about Wikipedia and see what we can uncover new information about Wikipedia that might be interesting to a Web Analyst using my regular arsenal of tools and anything esle I think of along the way.

First revelation:  The Vast Majority of people interested in Wikipedia are FEMALES AGED 25-24 according to MicroSoft’s Demographics Prediction Tool!

:0.10 :0.90

What about who’s searching for the term "Wikipedia"?  Who’s searching for something (ie: Wikipedia) might not actually be the same people who use that something (edit www.wikipedia.com).  First we need to figure out what terms we might use to capture the search demand by looking for the right set of keywords that audience most often uses.

Using Microsoft adCenter Lab’s Search Funnel (input) Beta tool to find the common terms people use to when searching for Wikipedia on MSN Search) this is what I found (thank you Microsoft for seeing part of what Search Marketing needs!)

The top 31% of all those who searched for Wikipedia on MSN used the following terms (based on the Search Funnel) and about 15% of all those who looked for Wikipedia used the top 5 terms below.

Now I plug this into MicroSoft AdCenter to get  more granular - Let’s see who is looking for Wikipedia….really based on the search term. 

Before we even go there - notice how many people stared with ebay, cnn, encarta, myspace, hotmail, amazon, dictionary and ended up looking for Wikipedia?  

About 6% of what I just pulled started out looking at a major news source or search engine and ended up at Wikipedia - and if we got the entire long tail (the entire list of terms that were used instead of the top 25) - we’d probably double or even triple that number.  A good chunk of people that look for news and information, end up at Wikipedia.

Certainly, we’ve got a large enough population of searchers that whatever AdCenter shows us ought to be a good indicator of who might really want to go to Wikipedia and edit a document or contribute to the community.

Why don’t we do this in a second post - since this one is quite long already?  See the post following this one for the actual details revealed of who goes to Wikipedia.