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Three ways to delve into the depths of Wikipedia
A study analyzes the user behavior of 482,000 Wikipedia visitors and identifies three curious search styles: Hunters, Attentives and Dancers. Published in Science Advances on October 25, it offers insights into knowledge search online.
Three ways to delve into the depths of Wikipedia
An analysis of the search patterns of nearly half a million people browsing Wikipedia shows that the site's users demonstrate three unique styles of curiosity.
There is the 'hunter' who pursues specific answers, the 'tinkerer' who searches for various new pieces of information, and the 'dancer' who connects unrelated concepts through the process of exploration. The study, published Oct. 25 in Science Advances 1, is the first to examine this curiosity framework outside of a laboratory setting.
As the world's largest encyclopedia, Wikipedia is a valuable resource for researchers studying how people search for information. “It is extremely important to understand more about how people actually use content online and how they consume knowledge,” says Tiziano Piccardi, who researches how to improve the online information ecosystem at Stanford University in California. “What we learn can be translated into improving Wikipedia.”
Search styles
Previous research into how people navigate Wikipedia has been conducted with relatively few participants under controlled laboratory conditions. The authors of the latest study conducted such an experiment in which they examined the Wikipedia usage behavior of 149 people and observed how they moved from article to article. They identified the styles of the hunter and the tinkerer 2. Their most recent work builds on these earlier findings by using real data from hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia users.
The team wanted to know whether the results of the previous studies applied only to the 149 participants, says co-author Dani Bassett, a researcher in human curiosity and learning at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “Or is this something that shows up consistently across hundreds of thousands of people and across different languages and countries?”
Working with the Wikimedia Foundation – Wikipedia's parent company based in San Francisco, California – the team examined two months of anonymized browsing data from more than 482,000 Wikipedia mobile app users from 50 countries and regions. These readers browsed articles in at least 14 languages.
“The data we have basically shows how people navigate Wikipedia, from page to page,” says Bassett. "From this data, we were able to extract networks. How do people move in this larger information space? What hyperlinks do they navigate, and what do these networks look like for each person?"
Social butterflies
The researchers found that they could generalize the curiosity styles from their previous study to this larger analysis. They identified the tinkerers, whom Bassett likens to social butterflies. There were also the hunters who moved logically between different sides, as if they were following a specific path. The researchers also discovered a third style of curiosity - the dancer - that others had identified in previous studies. This style describes “someone who switches between ideas in a creative way,” says Bassett.
By comparing browsing styles across countries and taking into account global inequality metrics, the researchers also found "a really strong relationship between a person's browsing style and the level of equality in the country," Bassett said. For example, loose, diverse knowledge networks where users consider a variety of topics are associated with countries that have lower gender and educational inequality. Although Bassett emphasizes that the research team doesn't know what exactly drives this correlation, they propose several hypotheses, such as that unequal societies could also create conditions that limit people's curiosity and desire to seek knowledge.
“This is the first study I’ve seen that’s theoretically sound,” says Piccardi. "These navigation patterns are really, really complex, so it's good to embed them in some theories and find a way to explore them. I think this is a good contribution." He adds that future studies could examine different aspects of the information-seeking process, such as how context and time can change a user's browsing behavior on Wikipedia.
“It really depends on why I'm using Wikipedia which of these models I might adapt,” says Andy Mabbett, a Wikipedia consultant from Birmingham, UK.
Bassett agrees that people might use different curiosity styles in different situations, but suggests that understanding a person's preferred style could help improve teamwork. “When we work together in teams, we can become more aware that we ask questions differently and explore knowledge spaces differently, and embrace that diversity.”
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Zhou, D. et al. Sci. Adv. 10, eadn3268 (2024).
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Lydon-Staley, D. M., Zhou, D., Blevins, A. S., Zurn, P. & Bassett, D. S. Nature Hum. Behavior 5, 327–336 (2021).