Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-06-06/Lists and rankings

Wikipedia picked up another honor last week as it was named one of the year's 100 best products by a major computer magazine, following a similar designation received recently by Wiktionary.

Last Wednesday, PC World magazine released its list, "The 100 Best Products of 2005", which appears in its July issue. This honor, which the magazine calls its "World Class Awards", is for "great products [that] meld practical features with innovation." In spite of the designation, however, not all of the "products" are commercial in nature, and Wikipedia is actually one of 23 honorees that are available free of charge.

Wikipedia came in at #60 overall on the ranked list, which was topped by Mozilla Firefox. The list &mdash; dominated, unsurprisingly, by computer software and hardware products &mdash; included only a handful of other websites, among them Google, Flickr, and Internet Archive. Also included at #33 was the website of the The New York Times, the only other information site to appear.

Earlier, Wiktionary was named one of the top 100 websites by PC Magazine in its annual feature, "Top 100 Sites You Didn't Know You Couldn't Live Without". The story was part of the magazine's 26 April edition (in contrast to PC World, the list is not ranked in order). Last year, Wikipedia was included as one of the top 100 sites in the same feature.

In other news related to rankings, Alterego reported in his blog Monday that Wikipedia has climbed up a notch in Google's rankings to achieve a PageRank of 9. Specifically, he indicated that it was the main page of the English Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) that reached this mark, rather than Wikipedia's multilingual portal (http://www.wikipedia.org), which still has a PageRank of 8. The difference can be explained because traffic to the portal would generally only come from people who don't have the main page for a particular language bookmarked. Only 63 sites have a PageRank of 10, the highest score possible.

Also this week: Downtime &mdash; Passwords &mdash; Content arbitration &mdash; Brockhaus &mdash; Features &mdash; Top 100 list &mdash; T.R.O.L.L. &mdash; Press coverage