Going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole? Science says you are one of these three types

If you’ve ever gone to look up a quick fact and just kept scrolling from one article (or page, or video), to another, to another – then you know the feeling of “going down the rabbit hole”. This experience of curiosity-driven web browsing has become synonymous with the free, user-generated encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is today one of the most popular websites in the world. With more users than Amazon, Netflix, TikTok or ChatGPT, the site is a convenient resource for people to learn and discover new interests.

In new research involving more than 480,000 Wikipedia users in 14 languages ​​in 50 countries, American researchers led by Dale Zhou at the University of Pennsylvania studied three distinctly different ways to go down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. These “curiosity styles” have been studied before, but not in such a large and diverse group of people who use Wikipedia “naturally” in everyday life.

Research can help us better understand the nature and importance of curiosity, its links to well-being, and strategies for preventing the spread of misinformation.

Wikipedia: First controversial, now mature, always popular

When Wikipedia was new in the early 2000s, it sparked controversy. People such as librarians and lecturers expressed concerns about Wikipedia’s potential to platform false or incomplete information.

Today, the fact of Wikipedia’s existing content is less of a concern than questions of bias, such as what topics the site’s volunteer editors deem important enough to include. There are global efforts to fill gaps in Wikipedia’s coverage, such as “edit-a-thons” to add notes to historically overlooked scientists and artists.

Part of what made Wikipedia innovative was how it met people’s intrinsic need to learn by inviting navigation from page to page, luring readers down rabbit holes. This, combined with the site’s participatory approach to creating and vetting pages, fueled its rapid growth. These qualities have also supported Wikipedia as a dominant source of daily information, globally.

research around Wikipedia has also evolved from early studies comparing it to Encyclopaedia Britannica.

This new study examines data about the activities of Wikipedia readers. He looks at the various “architectural styles of curiosity” that people embody when they sail.

Busy, hunters and dancers

The new study explores the “knowledge networks” associated with three main curiosity styles: busybody, hunter and dancer. The knowledge web is a visual representation of how readers “weave a thread” through Wikipedia articles.

As the researchers explain, “The busybody scouts for loose threads of novelty, the hunter pursues specific answers on a projectile trail, and the dancer leaps in creative break with tradition across typical domains of isolated knowledge.”

Previous research had shown evidence of busy bodies and hunters, and had speculated about the existence of dancers. The new study confirms that busybodies and hunters exist in many countries and languages. It also details the dancer’s style, which has been more elusive to document.

The researchers also identified geographic differences between curiosity styles.

In all 14 languages ​​studied, busy people tend to read more about culture, media, food, art, philosophy and religion. Hunters in 12 of 14 languages ​​tend to read more about science, technology, engineering and math.

In German and English, hunters were more attracted to pages about history and society than to busy bodies. The reverse was true in Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Dutch and Chinese.

The dancers were identified by their leaps forward between different themes, as well as by the diversity of their interests.

The research team points out that we still have much to learn about how curiosity is shaped by local norms. Linking these results to gender, ethnicity, access to education and other elements will create a more complete picture.

Curiosity is useful, in general… and we have more to learn

Overall, this study supports the benefits of freer, wider reading and browsing. Pursuing our curiosity can help us become better informed and expand our worldviews, creativity, and relationships.

At the same time, people sometimes need closure more than exploration. This is not a bad thing or a sign of narrow-mindedness. In many situations there are benefits to moving from looking for information and deciding that we have learned enough for now.

Endless curiosity can have downsides. This is especially true when it is motivated not by the joy of learning but by the concern of uncertainty and exclusion. As other research has found, for some people, curiosity can lead to misinformation and conspiracy theories. When information has a sense of novelty, or a hint of being hidden from powerful elites, it can make it more appealing, even when it’s not true.

The new study points out that different styles of curiosity do not simply or universally lead to creativity or well-being. People’s contexts and circumstances vary.

Each of us, like Goldilocks, can follow our curiosity to find not too much, not too little, but the information that is “just right”. The researchers also suggest evidence for a spectrum of new styles of curiosity beyond the main three, which will surely prompt more research in the future.

Stay curious and enjoy the rabbit hole

This study also suggests ways that Wikipedia (and sites like it) can better support curiosity-driven exploration. For example, instead of suggesting pages based on their popularity or similarity to other pages, Wikipedia could try to show readers their dynamic knowledge network.

As a Wikipedian would say, this new study is important. It shows how smaller-scale research into people’s reading and browsing can translate to a much larger scale across languages ​​and cultures.

As AI becomes more influential and the problems of disinformation grow, understanding the technologies that shape our access to information—and how we use them—is more important than ever. We know that YouTube recommendations can be a radicalizing pipeline for extremist content, for example, and ChatGPT is largely indifferent to the truth.

Studying Wikipedia’s readership reveals a rich picture of people’s various freely expressed curiosities on the Internet. It points to an alternative to technologies built on narrower assumptions about what people value, how we learn, and how we want to explore the Internet.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.