Why Do People Go To Wikipedia? A Survey Suggests It's Their Desire To Go Down that Random Rabbit Hole (niemanlab.org)

What's motivated people to visit the Wikipedia pages they're reading? Wikipedia recently tried to answer that question at scale by asking a sample of Wikipedia readers last June, "Why are you reading this article today?" It seems a lot of people go to Wikipedia for earnest, serious, information-seeking reasons. From a report: The study collected 215,000 responses from visitors to Wikipedia pages across 14 languages (Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Dutch, English, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian). The survey offered readers choices from seven types of motivations for why they were reading the Wikipedia page they were reading (e.g., "I have a work or school-related assignment, I need to make a personal decision based on this topic, I want to know more about a current event"). Thirty-five percent of Wikipedia users sampled across the 14 languages in this study said they were on the site to find a specific fact. Thirty-three percent said they were looking for an overview of a topic, while 32 percent said they wanted to get information on a topic in-depth.

Comments

Laziness

[tgeek]

Pure and simple. When I have a question about "something", whether that "something" is a casual curiosity question ("What did the Hittites contribute to civilization?") to a technical question I need for my job ("What's the advantages of protocol 'x' over protocol 'y'?), it's far easier to find a "good enough" answer from wikipedia than to filter thru pages of crap search results from the large search engines (most of which I refuse to use anyway). And if I want more detail than wp provides, there's often enough cited references to make wp into a little search engine.

Re:Laziness

[mysticgoat]

My experience differs from what you describe. Maybe we are searching for very different kinds of information. Or maybe you and I have very different criteria for judging the goodness of a bibliography.

I have generally found the further reading suggested in footnotes and biblios of Wikipedia articles to be quite useful. Partly because these often suggest materials that are quickly accessible web pages. When I think about it, I think I usually google for a Wikipedia article about each of the more prominent articles and authors that were referenced in the original article before going to any particular source, especially when the source is only available in hardcopy. But that secondary searching is so easy to do and takes so little time that I don't take much conscious note of it.

I miss my days of spending hours in the card catalog and the library stacks: those are now ancient memories. I remember feeling the sense of a day well spent when I left the library with three books on a subject of interest. Now between Wikipedia and Google I cover a much broader range of incidental discoveries and I am prepared for much deeper research into the subject of interest in much less time.

Re:Curiousitity's sake

[Kernel Kurtz]

Even when all I had was a set of physical encyclopedias and no internet access, it was not unusual for me to pass the time by flipping a volume open and seeing if I could find something interesting to read.

Likewise. I can also spend hours "surfing" Wikipedia. Start on one topic, click some links to expand on a concept, click some more links and so on, and after a while you are reading about something completely different from what you started on.

I go for product definitions

[Okian Warrior]

A lot of times the Wikipedia website is more clear and direct than the web site of whichever product I want to find out about.

I see a reference to the "Widget" product and want to find out more about it. The Widget.com website shows train tracks leading into the distance and the text "It's a new synergy of productivity" or some such.

The Wikipedia page for "Widget" is direct and explicit on the first line: Widget is a software package that does *this*...