Three ways to immerse yourself in the depths of Wikipedia
Three ways to immerse yourself in the depths of Wikipedia
An analysis of the search patterns of almost half a million people who browsed Wikipedia shows that the users of the page three unique styles of curiosity demonstrations.
There is the 'hunter' who pursues specific answers, the 'inventor', who is looking for various new information, and the 'dancer', which combines configurative concepts through the process of exploration. The study published on October 25th in Science Advances 1 is the first to curiosity outside of a laboratory environment examined.
As the largest encyclopedia in the world, Wikipedia is a valuable resource for researchers who are looking for how people are looking for information. "It is extremely important to understand more about how people actually use the 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 the improvement of Wikipedia."
search styles
Earlier research on how people navigate Wikipedia were carried out with relatively few participants under controlled laboratory conditions. The authors of the latest study carried out such an experiment in which they examined Wikipedia's usage behavior in 149 people and observed how they changed from articles to articles. They identified the styles of the hunter and the inventor 2 . Your latest work is based on this 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 only apply to the 149 participants, says co -author Dani Bassett, a researcher for human curiosity and learns at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "Or is it something that is consistent over hundreds of thousands of people and across different languages and countries?"
In cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation-the parent company of Wikipedia, based in San Francisco, California-the team examined two months anonymized browsing data of more than 482,000 users of the Wikipedia Mobile app from 50 countries and regions. These readers leaf through articles in at least 14 languages.
"The data we have basically show how people navigate through Wikipedia," says Bassett. "We were able to extract networks from this data. How do people move in this larger information space? Which hyperlinks do you navigate about and how do these networks look for every person?"
sociable butterflies
The researchers found that they were able to generalize the curiosity styles from their previous study to this more extensive analysis. They identified the inventors who compares bassett with social butterflies. There were also the hunters who logically switched between different sides, as if they were following a certain path. The researchers also discovered a third style of curiosity - the dancer - that others had identified in previous studies. This style describes "someone who changes ideas in a creative way," says Bassett.
By comparing the browsing styles between countries and taking into account global inequality metrics, the researchers also found "a really strong relationship between the browsing style of a person and the degree of equality in the country," said Bassett. For example, loose, diverse knowledge networks in which users look at a variety of topics are connected to countries that have a lower gender and educational inequality. Although Bassett emphasizes that the research team does not know exactly what this correlation drives, they suggest several hypotheses, such as that unequal societies could also create conditions to seek curiosity and the desire of people to find knowledge.
"This is the first study I see that is theoretically sound," says Piccardi. "These navigation patterns are really, really complex, so it is good to embed them in some theories and find a way to explore them. I think that's a good contribution." He adds that future studies could investigate various aspects of the information search process, such as context and time to change the browsing behavior of a user on Wikipedia.
"It depends very much on what reason I use Wikipedia, which these models I may be adapted," says Andy Mabbett, a Wikipedia consultant from Birmingham, UK
bassett agrees that people in different situations could apply different curiosity styles, but suggests that understanding the preferred style of a person could help improve teamwork. "If we work together in teams, we can become more conscious that we ask questions differently and explore knowledge spaces differently, and take this 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., Zenn, P. & Bassett, D. S. Nature Hum. Behev. 5, 327–336 (2021).