Wikimedia Research Showcase - November 2016 (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#November_2016)Why We Read Wikipedia
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.
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