Study reveals that Wikipedia users are divided into three types: nosy people, hunters, and dancers
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Many Internet users have come across a Wikipedia article while searching or researching, or have been absorbed in reading the three major Wikipedia literature while following a link. A study of 480,000 Wikipedia users found that there are three types of curiosity.
Architectural styles of curiosity in global Wikipedia mobile app readership | Science Advances
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn3268
Studying Wikipedia browsing habits to learn how people learn | Penn Today
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/studying-wikipedia-browsing-habits-learn-how-people-learn
Going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole? Science says you're one of these three types
https://theconversation.com/going-down-a-wikipedia-rabbit-hole-science-says-youre-one-of-these-three-types-242018
A research team led by Dani Bassett of the University of Pennsylvania in the United States conducted an experiment in which 149 participants were asked to browse Wikipedia for 15 minutes a day for 21 days. They found that Wikipedia users have two types of curiosity: 'inquisitive' and 'hunter.'
Of the two, the Inquisitive type is the type that jumps on new information as their curiosity leads them and there is little connection between the articles they read, while the Hunter type tends to pursue specific answers like a hunter stalking his prey.
'Curiousers love novelty and tend to dart from place to place without any reason,' Bassett explains. 'In contrast to Hunters, they are more goal-oriented and focused, trying to solve problems, find missing pieces, or complete their view of the world.'
These types were proposed by Perry Zurn, a professor of philosophy at American University and visiting professor at Cornell University, who used his research into literature from the past 2,000 years to suggest that there are three types of curiosity: inquisitives, hunters, and 'dancers.'
To verify the existence of the remaining dancer types, Bassett et al. further extracted Wikipedia browsing data from logs collected in March and October 2022 and analyzed the browsing data of 482,760 Wikipedia users collected across 14 languages in 50 countries.
As a result, it was confirmed that nosy and hunter types exist across Wikipedia users in multiple countries and languages, and the existence of a dancer type that had not been found in smaller studies was also revealed.
'Dancers move along information trails, but unlike Curiousers, they jump between ideas in creative, choreographed movements,' Zuern says. 'That is, they don't just jump randomly, but connect different domains to create something new.'
Bassett and her colleagues found that Curiousers tended to read more about culture, media, food, art, philosophy, and religion in all 14 languages, while Hunters tended to read more about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in 12 of the 14 languages. Dancers were also characterized by a diverse range of interests, jumping between a variety of topics.
'In countries with greater inequality, particularly in terms of gender and access to education, people tend to browse Wikipedia with more focused intent. In contrast, in more equal countries, the articles viewed were broader in scope and covered a wider variety of topics,' said Dale Chou, lead author of the study.
The research team believes that 'in countries with high inequality, patriarchal oppressive structures are strong, so knowledge production is restricted to the hunter type, whereas in equal countries, diverse ideas are accepted and therefore the inquisitive type is more prevalent.'
It's also possible that in more equal countries, people are more likely to use Wikipedia for personal curiosity rather than for work, and that the age, gender, socio-economic status and education level of Wikipedia users in different countries may be reflected in the differences in browsing patterns.
In the future, the research team aims to explore the motivations of Internet users for accessing Wikipedia and to verify whether users are driven by external factors such as work, or by internal curiosity such as personal interests.
'Wikipedia has a very special place on the internet because it only contains free content, whereas the rest of the internet is filled with commercial advertising and customized media and content to stimulate individual purchases,' said David Lydon-Staley, one of the study's co-authors. 'This raises the question of how much control we have over where our curiosity leads us when we use the internet outside of Wikipedia.'
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