An online audience measurement and media planning solution, comScore (News - Alert) Media Metrix, has found that Wikipedia and its cousin sites, which include Wikibooks and Wikimedia Commons (all operating under the Wikimedia Foundation), attract a whopping 500 million+ unique visitors each month.

Unique visitors across the network of sites increased to 517 million last month, breaking the previous record set at 492 million in May 2012. The Wikimedia Foundation – a not-for-profit organization – is experiencing growth across all of its sites, all over the world. Total site traffic from India has increased from 4 percent to 4.8 percent, and in Brazil traffic has risen from 3.6 percent to 5.9 percent.

The substantial growth has affected the amount of time readers spend browsing through the massive amount of content on Wikipedia. Monthly page requests have experienced a growth spurt – leaping from 17.1 billion to 21.3 billion over the last year.

Mobile devices are accountable for a chunk of the action – accounting for 15 percent of monthly views. The Wikimedia Foundation is looking to keep that percentage on the rise by ramping up its mobile abilities.

Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, says the company will be enhancing its mobile offerings to ensure that “the entire planet” will have mobile access to Wiki sites.

It's an ambitious, but plausible idea that every Internet-abled person on earth can tap into and share the “sum of all knowledge,” Gardner says, adding that it's “starting to look like an achievable goal, if we come together to make it happen.”

The Wikimedia Foundation is already taking steps to make a mobile knowledge-for-all, if you will, a reality. The Web app for Wikipedia underwent a series of updates last February that enabled anyone to login with their mobile device and create a ‘watchlist’ to keep abreast of changes to pages of interest.

That month alone, Wikipedia topped three billion mobile page views. This number, however, does not speak to unique visitors, and may include repeat viewers.

Also, this only pertained to Wikipedia – not its sibling sites. 

In going forward, the Wikimedia foundation will roll out features allowing anyone to add photos and make small edits to Wikipedia articles.