Wiki articles are high in the search engines. Will wiki content on my site draw traffic too?
Let’s assume that the articles are relevant to your site.
I don’t understand what exactly do you want to do? Copy wikipedia articles and place them on your site? That wouldn’t change much, because original wikipedia articles will be still ranked higher than your site.
Or do you want to create your own wikipedia-styled site with original, thematic content? If so, yes, you can do it, but still it doesn’t cause automatic rise in number of views, although may make content more interesting.
I think he wants to add content to existing Wikipedia articles, and reference them with links to his own site. Generally, that is frowned upon, but if the information is encyclopedic and the web site is not blatantly commercial, I don’t think anyone will revert it.
No, I think he means copy wiki articles onto his own site.
I know of quite a few people who do that - using the copied content on a page festooned with ads in the hope of generating income - either on their own sites, or more commonly, on ‘get paid to write articles’ sites such as Squidoo.
You can copy content from wiki articles and post it at your website, within the bounds of their license. But it’s not the content itself that makes those pages rank high on google, it’s the fact that they reside on a very popular and heavily linked website (ie, wikipedia).
Dozens (maybe hundreds) of websites exist that are basically mirrors of the wiki site, in part or whole. The idea is that they can attract traffic simply using the wikipedia content, but it generally doesn’t work.
Now, if you have a robust site and want to supplement it with wikipedia content, then yeah, I can see how that might make sense. but building a whole new site just out of that content… probably not going to generate any traffic.
There are Wikipedia articles that link to The Straight Dope, Cecil Adams’ columns.