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Comment by estel | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, the overwhelming majority of people who I've observed using Wikipedia go to www.wikipedia.com and then select "English".

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Really? I've never in my life went to wikipedia without following a link from a Google search. I don't think I've ever seen the Wikipedia home page.

Indeed, I can't say I recall its appearance at all.

Really? I use a custom search engine in my browsers so I can search directly from the address bar since I know I want Wikipedia results and don't want to sift through other junk.

Really? I have my assistant find the article of interest and send a bit.ly link via courier.

Really? I use Encyclopedia Britannica. It's the best.

To the above few parents, keep this idiocy on reddit, please.

I go to Wikipedia itself all the time. I just type 'en' + enter into my address bar because I'm so used to it, but I'm sure there's probably millions of people that always go to the first page instead.

I still think it should remain mostly as it is, though. I didn't like their changes to it.

Could you contextualize what population you're drawing your sample from, please?

English speaking people, presumably.

Maybe what was meant was that, of those who go to Wikipedia directly, not through Google, they usually go through www.wikipeida.org or wikipedia.org, not en.wikipedia.org. I would agree with that assessment.

Me too, but let me add that I think it is also worth considering that they may not be there to search. For that reason it feels a bit weird to make www.wikipedia.org a crappy version of www.google.com...

My own use-case, and that of others I see using it:

  * Go to wikipedia.org
  * Try to ignore the glut of language names and find the tiny search box
  * Search

But does it matter what language is more popular? That is not what Wikipedia is about, really

Sorry, the language wasn't supposed to be the key user action here: it was more how people navigate to en.wiki from wikipedia.com.

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