Launched in 2012, the Google Knowledge Graph is basically a service provided by Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) to boost the information provided by search engines. This is a knowledge base that is designed to improve user experience, as well as to gather vital information from different trustworthy sources – the information is detailed and carefully structured, and it also contains various links to external websites.
However, there has been a lot of debate regarding the increasing popularity of Google Knowledge Graph and how can this impact Wikipedia, which has been the primary source of information for millions of users all around the world.
As many specialists claim, the visits to Wikipedia have gone down towards the end of 2012, the year when Google Knowledge Graph was launched – this was very discouraging for Wikipedia, which has been recording a continuously growing number of visits over the past decade. The own statistics of Wikipedia have shown that the visits to the website have decreased by approximately one fifth for the English language pages. However, the visits to pages available in other international languages like Spanish or German have also decreased by approximately one third. Wikipedia became popular by offering well-structured and accurate information.
When it comes to the number of visitors, Wikipedia is known to be on the 6th place in the top of the most visited websites in the world, and the annual report card that was recently released has revealed that Wikipedia’s total number of pageviews has started to decline. Not only does this decline refer to the number of visitors, but also to the number of new editors, which can be a problem given the 30+ million articles that are available at the moment. There are articles that require the in-depth technical knowledge and expertise of skilled users, and the decline in the number of editors can lead to a decline of the entire website.
Given the fact that Wikipedia was unchallenged for years and now Google’s Knowledge Graph has become one of its feared competitors, it may be possible that Wikipedia will continue to notice a decline in the number of pageviews in 2014 as well. If people who were looking for information about a particular public person were almost sure to click on Wikipedia before, now the Google Knowledge Graph comes before that and takes a great deal of Wikipedia’s users. Nevertheless, it must be said that even though the traffic of Wikipedia seems to drop inevitably, the Knowledge Graph by Google still draws most of its information from Wikipedia, at the moment.
