Examinations and tests have shown that on average, Wikipedia now rivals Britannica or other “real” encyclopedias in validity. Of course that is a very broad sample of topics, and modern day events and pop culture are not found in Britannica. This means we must rely on the collective common knowledge to give us the information we need to be amused or informed about the most current events in the world around us.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a large wiki – hence the name. It is a large system that collects the knowledge of a large population working under the theory that the collective knowledge of enough people will be correct. To help solidify information, it requires references and annotations of entries.

If I were to add an entry in Wikipedia, you can easily come in behind me and edit that entry. You can change it to whatever you want, but in reality you’ll probably just add a few things I left out or change some wording to make it more concise and valid. Over time, hundreds, or maybe thousands, of visitors and editors will make small changes until the Wikipedia entry reflects a common consensus. If everyone agrees the entry is correct, it most likely is. (more…)

There is growing concern among industry watchdogs that the traffic on various traffic monitors is not completely legitimate. These groups claim that the various ways of measuring traffic not only conflict with each other, but can be flat out wrong.

The high end measurements of traffic patterns and usage are taken the same way as television statistics – through samples. And those samples just aren’t doing a very good job. When you watch television, there are only so many things and channels you can watch. With the internet, the opportunities and activities online are endless.

Traffic monitors such as Netratings and comScore rely on their own versions of sample data to determine traffic patterns and rankings. The websites monitored, often high end sites, often notice that the supposed traffic coming to the site, which determines rankings, does not match their own server records. In many cases the numbers are very different. (more…)

Traffic is the lifeblood of the internet. A site can be beautiful and packed with desirable content, but without visitors, it languishes. For this reason, webmasters monitor their website traffic very carefully. The search patterns and uses of the internet have become more difficult to track, however, so traffic monitoring is beginning to take a different approach.

What is Traffic Monitoring?
The owners of websites want to know who is coming to their websites. Companies monitor the visitors to sites through various methods and pull information from the computers of their visitors. With the right tracking tools, a webmaster can see:

• How a visitor found his site
• How long the visitor stayed on the site
• What pages of the site he viewed
• How long he stayed on the website total
• Where his computer is located
• How many times he’s been to the site. (more…)