"By rating Wikipedia an '8' Alexa are saying that Wikipedia is the 8th most popular web site out of every site the company collects data on. For contrast, my personal blog - low traffic, little content, updated infrequently - has a paltry rank of 7,476,670. This site, iTWire.com, is ranked 39,326. If you're interested, here’s an interesting article comparing Wikipedia's Alexa ranking against many, many other web sites.
"If you have a site as massive as Wikipedia, hit as many times a day by as many people as it, what are you going to do? We're talking more than 10 million distinct articles, in 250 different languages, served to over 684 million people per year.
"The answer is that Wikipedia have a massive server farm driving their web site -- some 400 servers, in fact. And each and every one runs Linux."
