Apparently, Google’s Knowledge Graph has been eating into Wikipedia’s page views and to such an extent that hits have declined by almost 10 percent within December 2012 and December 2013. This roughly translates into 2 billion page views and that’s quite a lot.
What should be noted is that most of its popular pages have been struck badly. For example, the English version of the website saw close to 12 percent less hits year over year and its Japanese counterpart saw a decline of about 9 percent. German Wikipedia isn’t doing well either, its hits have gone down by up to 17 percent in a matter of a year.
In the opinions of the experts, Google Knowledge Graph is to be blamed for the reduction in the hits that Wikipedia received in 2013. But the executives over at the website that calls itself ‘free encyclopedia’ say that they must have made mistakes while calculating the hits, but we highly doubt that’s the reason.
But here in India, the hits for Wikipedia pages in regional languages have increased by a considerable extent, reports the folks at the Times of India. Hindi, Bengali and Malayalam pages have seen a growth of 34 percent, 46 percent and 36 percent, respectively. Marathi Wikipedia views shot up by 4 percent and Telugu wasn’t that well with 1 percent increase. In the country, Tamil was the only vernacular language whose views slid by 11 percent.
If Google Knowledge Graph is indeed guilty of eating into the page views of Wikipedia, we hope the search engine giant will pay heed to this bit of information and do something to bring the free encyclopedia back on track.