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January 8, 2009
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Press Coverage

Selected news stories about the Pew Internet Project and articles citing our data.

Wikipedia Wins Over Web Users; Despite Questions of Accuracy, More Than a Third of Online Americans Turn to the Crowd-Edited Encyclopedia for Information, a New Survey Found

4/25/2007 | CoverageCoverage

Leslie Brooks Suzukamo, St. Paul Pioneer Press, C1

'" More than a third of online American adults - 36 percent - use Wikipedia, according to a nationwide survey released Tuesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit initiative funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Despite an ongoing debate about the reliability and accuracy of Wikipedia articles, the Pew survey showed that Wikipedia was more popular among the well educated. Among college graduates who use the Internet, half use Wikipedia, compared with only 22 percent of Internet users who are high school graduates.

The success of Wikipedia is a vote of confidence in its own faith in what Internet boosters like to call "the wisdom of crowds."

"It is a testimony to the broadening reality on the Internet that people used to be consumers of information and now they are producers of that information," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project.

Pew researchers found Wikipedia to be more popular on a typical day than some other activities it has tracked, such as online retailing, dating Web sites, making reservations on travel sites, using chat rooms and even online auctions. "


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