Wikimedia Research/Showcase/Archive/2016/11

November 2016

November 16, 2016 Video: YouTube

Why We Read Wikipedia

slides

By Leila Zia

Every day, millions of readers come to Wikipedia to satisfy a broad range of information needs, however, little is known about what these needs are. In this presentation, I share the result of a research that sets to help us understand Wikipedia readers better. Based on an initial user study on English, Persian, and Spanish Wikipedia, we build a taxonomy of Wikipedia use-cases along several dimensions, capturing users’ motivations to visit Wikipedia, the depth of knowledge they are seeking, and their knowledge of the topic of interest prior to visiting Wikipedia. Then, we quantify the prevalence of these use-cases via a large-scale user survey conducted on English Wikipedia. Our analyses highlight the variety of factors driving users to Wikipedia, such as current events, media coverage of a topic, personal curiosity, work or school assignments, or boredom. Finally, we match survey responses to the respondents’ digital traces in Wikipedia’s server logs, enabling the discovery of behavioral patterns associated with specific use-cases. Our findings advance our understanding of reader motivations and behavior on Wikipedia and have potential implications for developers aiming to improve Wikipedia’s user experience, editors striving to cater to (a subset of) their readers’ needs, third-party services (such as search engines) providing access to Wikipedia content, and researchers aiming to build tools such as article recommendation engines.