The act of visiting Wikipedia isn’t too shocking at this point.  We all do it.  But an interesting new Hitwise report looks at where the average American goes next.

 Sites Visited After Wikipedia

Google received 9.81 percent of away-from Wikipedia traffic last week; this probably indicates that folks are continuing their research elsewhere.  If anything, it’s only surprising that the number isn’t higher.

As for the second most popular destination, MySpace, this might speak to the makeup of Wikipedia’s user base.  In any case, MySpace had a downstream share of 3.16 percent.

The Internet Movie Database and YouTube followed next.  Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Search scored well with fifth, sixth, and seventh place finishes, respectively.

All other sorts of big names round out Heather Hopkins’s list of the top 20 sites.  She writes, “The really interesting thing I noticed was that most categories contain clear authority websites.  Among Entertainment websites, IMDB and YouTube are authorities.  Among Shopping and Classifieds it’s Amazon and eBay.  Among Music websites it’s All Music Guide For Sports it’s ESPN.  For Finance it’s Yahoo! Finance.  For Health & Medical it’s WebMD and United States National Library of Medicine.”

If these sites are part of your free encyclopedia routine, congratulations – you’re on top of popular patterns.  If not, well, you’re just unrepresentative of the Wikipedia crowd.