Wikimedia Research/Showcase/Archive/2018/12

December 2018

12 December 2018 Video: YouTube

Why the World Reads Wikipedia

By Florian Lemmerich, RWTH Aachen University; Diego Sáez-Trumper, Wikimedia Foundation; Robert West, EPFL; and Leila Zia, Wikimedia Foundation

So far, little is known about why users across the world read Wikipedia's various language editions. To bridge this gap, we conducted a comparative study by combining a large-scale survey of Wikipedia readers across 14 language editions with a log-based analysis of user activity. For analysis, we proceeded in three steps: First, we analyzed the survey results to compare the prevalence of Wikipedia use cases across languages, discovering commonalities, but also substantial differences, among Wikipedia languages with respect to their usage. Second, we matched survey responses to the respondents' traces in Wikipedia's server logs to characterize behavioral patterns associated with specific use cases, finding that distinctive patterns consistently mark certain use cases across language editions. Third, we could show that certain Wikipedia use cases are more common in countries with certain socio-economic characteristics; e.g., in-depth reading of Wikipedia articles is substantially more common in countries with a low Human Development Index. The outcomes of this study provide a deeper understanding of Wikipedia readership in a wide range of languages, which is important for Wikipedia editors, developers, and the reusers of Wikipedia content.