Another way to look at Wikipedia’s influence: Wikipedia reaches almost one-third of the total mobile population each month, according to Knight’s analysis, which used data from the audience-tracking firm Nielsen. This is an astounding finding, especially when you consider how Wikipedia stacks up against other informational or news sites. While Wikipedia has, on average, more than 52 million people reach its site from mobile devices each month, the next most-popular site Knight looked at, CNN, gets less than half of that—about 21 million unique visitors. BuzzFeed had just shy of 14 million average monthly visitors.

Knight Foundation

Wikipedia’s numbers are less surprising when you consider its history. For one thing, Wikipedia has long been a force on the web for desktop users. It’s routinely among the top 10 most popular sites, along with giants like Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, and Google. In a news and information context, Wikipedia is a mainstay partly because of its close relationship with several other newsy sites; they often feature Wikipedia links, and vice versa. “Current news and events are often embedded within Wikipedia entries so it presents an opportunity to learn about an area of interest after reading a news article,” the Knight report says. “What is clear from the Nielsen data is that the popular information site also drives traffic to news. For instance, Wikipedia was one of the top 10 websites visited prior to exploring sites as varied as BuzzFeed, Daily MailOnline, nytimes.com, usatoday.com, washingtonpost.com and Tribune Newspapers.”

On top of that, Wikipedia gets an enormous chunk of its traffic from Google. (Knight specifically looked at the Wikipedia app, rather than just the mobile site, in this case.) That’s because people often wind up at Wikipedia when they go searching for answers to questions or information about people or events—and also because Google tends to give Wikipedia pretty strong standing in its search results. My colleague, Ian Bogost, suggested to me this may have something to do with Google autocomplete. When Google finishes a search for you, it’s already primed to offer a path to Wikipedia that complements that search. I think Ian’s probably on to something here, but Knight said it wasn’t able to parse out the extent to which Google traffic to Wikipedia was generated by autocompleted searches.

Either way, Wikipedia’s reliance on Google sets the site apart from its peers in news and information. Facebook was by far the dominant traffic driver for nearly every other news or informational app that Knight analyzed (with the exception of the unofficial Reddit app, Reddit is Fun, which gets most of its traffic from YouTube). Relatedly, Knight found that, in general, people are spending less time on apps other than Facebook, a trend that underscores Facebook’s staggering influence online. But Facebook’s swelling dominance doesn’t appear to be rattling Wikipedia.