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

Posted by msmash on from the closer-look dept.

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.

3 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. Curiousitity's sake by OrangeTide · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  2. Eh by fisted · · Score: 5, Informative

    35 percent [...] said they were on the site to find a specific fact.
    33 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.

    So that leaves us with 0% who just wanted to go down that random rabbit hole, as the headline says. Seems legit.

    --
    CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
  3. I go for product definitions by Okian+Warrior · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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*...