世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com reported on the start of a new series of regular surveys being conducted by goo Research on the subjet of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Demographics

Over the 14th and 15th of May 2007, goo Research interviewed by means of a private internet-based questionnaire 1,087 members of its monitor panel. 47.1% of the sample was female, 11.7% in their teens, 21.3% in thier twenties, 19.4% in their thirties, 18.4% in their forties, and 29.2% in their fifites.

I think my opinion of Wikipedia is best expressed by the Wikipedia Nofollow WordPress plugin I developed. I feel it pollutes search results as bloggers tend to lazily quote it as it is the handiest reference, reinforcing its strength and putting it on top of Google searches for far too many keywords. In addition, with its nofollow policy, it doesn’t acknowledge its sources in the eyes of search engines, thus strengthening its position in the search engine optimisation wars.

Research results

Q1: Do you know the online encyclopedia Wikipedia? (Sample size=1,087)

Know of it (to SQs)	73.9%
Don’t know of it	26.1%

Q1SQ1: Do you know all of Wikipedia has been created by ordinary users, and it is a free contents encyclopedia? (Sample size=803)

Know that	77.6%
Don’t know that	22.4%

Next, they asked the 754 people (69.4% of the sample) who had visited the Wikipedia web site the following question.

Q2: Do you use Wikipedia entries as a reference source? (Sample size=754)

Use as a reference a lot	31.2%
Use as a reference a bit	65.1%
Don’t use as a reference much	3.3%
Don’t use as a reference at all	0.4%