Studying Wikipedia Browsing Habits To Understand How People Learn

A collaborative team of researchers, including Annenberg Associate Professor David Lydon-Staley, found that gender and education inequality align with different types of knowledge exploration.

Have you ever been down a Wikipedia rabbit hole?

Annenberg Associate Professor David Lydon-Staley is one of a team of six researchers who recently examined the browsing habits of 482,760 Wikipedia readers from 50 different countries.

The study classified habits based on information acquisition styles, one example being “the busybody,” someone who has a preference for sampling diverse concepts, and a second example being the “hunter,” someone who undertakes a more targeted information search and becomes deeply immersed in a topic.

In the research, published in the journal Science Advances, Lydon-Staley, with Dani Bassett, Professor of Bioengineering and director of the Complex Systems Lab at Penn, and colleagues discovered stark differences in browsing habits between countries with more education and gender equality versus less equality, raising key questions about the impact of culture on curiosity and learning.

“We observed that in countries with greater inequality, particularly around gender and access to education, people tended to browse with more focused intent. In contrast, browsing was more expansive in countries with more equality and covered a wider diversity of topics,” said first author and Penn grad Dale Zhou. “While the exact reasons for why this is occurring are not fully clear, we have some strong hunches.”

This work builds on a previous study led by Lydon-Staley, in the Complex Systems Lab at the time, which asked 149 participants from Philadelphia to browse Wikipedia for 15 minutes a day for 21 days. “Beginning this line of work in a small sample allowed us to work out the methods needed to capture the complex information-seeking that accompanies curiosity,” Lydon-Staley said.

“Working out those methods then allowed us to scale up and ask whether we could confirm that the styles we observed could be found outside of our sample of Philadelphians.”

The team worked with Martin Gerlach of the Wikimedia Foundation, who had data of more than 2 million human browsers. That allowed them to apply their “existing methods, and develop new methods, to capture styles of curiosity emerging across 14 different languages of Wikipedia and 50 different countries or territories,” Lydon-Staley said.

The researchers cite three main hypotheses driving the associations between information-seeking approaches and equality.

“One is that it’s possible that countries that have more inequality also have more patriarchal structures of oppression that are constraining the knowledge production approaches to be more hunter-like,” said Bassett. “Countries that have greater equality, in contrast, are open to a diversity of ideas, and therefore a diversity of ways that we’re engaging in the world. This is more like the ‘busybody’ — the one that’s moving between ideas in a very open-minded way.”

A second possibility the researchers outline is that browsers visit Wikipedia for different purposes in different countries, citing how someone in a country with higher equality may go to the site for entertainment or leisure rather than for work.

Finally, the third possible explanation is that Wikipedia users in different countries may vary in age, gender, socioeconomic status or educational background. These demographic differences could help explain the variations in browsing behavior across regions.

Looking ahead, the team aims to explore the motivations behind Wikipedia browsing, examining whether users are driven by extrinsic factors, like work, or intrinsic curiosity, like personal interest. Additionally, the team is currently expanding this work by capturing online health information-seeking, asking where people search for health information online and how this information-seeking influences health-related knowledge.

“Wikipedia is a very special place on the internet,” Lydon-Staley says. “The site features exclusively free content and no commercial advertisements. Much of the rest of the contemporary digital landscape is designed to activate individuals’ buying impulses and customizes our media content. This raises the question of how much we are in charge of where our curiosity takes us in online contexts beyond Wikipedia.”