Wikipedia talk:Press release: Wikipedia surpasses Britannica

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This is silly bragging. It is also false; if you add eb.com then we still lose. Wait until we are substantially and consistently ahead. --mav

This is not really true, b/c britannica.com is not britanica online, it is britanica's website. So in a sense, we passed britanica online (i.e. eb.com) a long time ago in hits. Additionally, when you add the 1 week averages of eb.com and britanica.com together, we are still ahead by 73 reach per million users (which I assume is a measure of hits?) I really have no idea what reach is honestly. But you can't add the ranks together, b/c those are based on actual hits (I assume). Maybe you could explain to me how we lose when adding eb.com? MB 17:30 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)
OK the eb.com thing was wrong (for some reason I thought they went to the same website). But that doesn't change the fact that we are "ahead" by only 42 points. That isn't anything solid or anything at all worth bragging about, in and of itself, except among ourselves. It is also not a very fair comparison since EB online is a pay closed service and we are fully open to Google. This type of press release makes us look like we are begging for media attention and the last thing we need is negative coverage (or much more traffic for that matter ; have you noticed how slow everything is?). So we should only have press releases when there is really something major to report. A 42 point lead doesn't cut it. Wait at least until the Wikimedia Foundation is fully operational and able to accept donations and grants. By that time our lead can be casually mentioned along with our article count in our press release about the Wikimedia Foundation. --mav 17:41 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Sounds sensible to me. But not really a good reason to delete the press release, some of it can be used later when writing the other press release. MB 17:44 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)
It will still be there in the revision history, just not visible for all the world (and Google) to see. -- The Anome 18:16 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yep. Give it another three to six months. See this graph -- The Anome 17:22 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps when Wikipedia hits a three-month average rank of 2000, or rank 1000? Looking at the graph, and very crudely extrapolating on this log-linear daily rank plot, neither of these is too far away. -- The Anome 17:24 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)

btw Alexia.com is not accurate. they even say themselves its not accurate. -fonzy

Yeah, I think being in the top 1000 alone would be enough. Then we can casually mention that we are three times as popular as Britannica. The current margin can easily disappear and is therefore not something worth bragging about - all it is good for is an interesting entry on the Announcements page. This page should be blanked. --mav 17:29 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)

"There is no such thing as bad publicity." Pulling even with britannica.com is not a huge deal, but companies routinely issue press releases for much less, and if just a handful of news orgs pick it up because it's a slow news day, that's still likely to generate another couple dozen contributors out of people who hear about Wikipedia for the first time because of the news reports. The only downside would be if several more important press releases were expected within the next 2-3 weeks, wouldn't want to have those ignored by news orgs because "we just did a Wikipedia story". Stan 18:00 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I would think that the forthcoming Wikipedia Foundation press release would be that story. Perhaps this info can be tacked on to that? -- The Anome 18:14 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)
"we just did a Wikipedia story" is exactly why we should wait so that we get the biggest media bang for the buck (sic server slowdowns). Another very important thing is for us to have the ability to accept donations and grants when we do have our next press release. By that time we should be clearly more popular than Britannica (for the past several weeks we have been leapfrogging each other). In short; wait until we have something solid to report on and we are able to accept donations so that we can buy a faster webserver and maybe even a separate server to perform searches on. --mav
Where is this so called "forthcoming Wikipedia Foundation press release" being worked on (link please)? MB 18:20 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Use this press release, our 2003 Press Release and Wikimedia as guides to write one. I think it is a good time to start (maybe doing so will prompt Jimbo to finish the 501c IRS application). Hm. I wonder if there is a Europe-wide tax-exempt classification.... --mav

Some mention should be done to the fact that a substantial part of Wikipedia was taken from 1911 EB (How much?).

A Wikipedia Google search of 1911 Encyclopedia yields 3,220 results, 1911 Encyclopaedia gets 315 and 1911 Encyclopædia gets 57. So I would say that we have between 3,000 to 4,000 EB 1911 articles (as far as I know EB 1911 text is almost always attributed here). --mav