"Caveats aside, here's the gist, with rounded numbers: Wikimedia's monthly traffic is 7 billion page views per month. Google is responsible for an astounding 24% of all this traffic. Put differently, Wikipedia/ Wikimedia results in Google searches are clicked on roughly 56 million times a day. (Yahoo in comparison only sends 2%; Ask.com ends up at a meager 0.05%.) Pages from Wikipedia are heavily cross-linked, and internal links from Wikimedia properties make up 44% of the traffic, according to the numbers." - Leuksman.com

My comments: When he writes Wikimedia above, he is referring to what we think of as Wikipedia (WP). Compare what Google sends to WP with what Yahoo sends. Other mainstream search engines send even less than Yahoo. This describes an important dependency of WP on Google. Money is tight at WP. How much tighter would it be with 24% less traffic?

I could even say, we should throw out the 44% cross-link/internal link traffic. When we do that, the 24% Google number grows by roughly 44% to 34%, which is to say, a third of WP's traffic is from Google. Wales has heard the of the diversity theory, that when you rely too much on one customer, you tie your fate to what happens to them. It is a given that these numbers from Leuksman.com do not meet the definition of statistics. But I think they are close, off by a factor of no more than 25%. We should have better numbers, and I bet someone at WP could do this, if they aren't doing it all ready.  More

Humor of the day: I am watching the Wikimedia article on WP. Lately someone put a Hammer and Sickle image on it and added the phase, "Wikipedia is Communism".