Readers Preference and Behavior on Wikipedia
Lehmann, Janette; Müller-Birn, Claudia; Lanaido, David; Lalmas, Mounia; Kaltenbrunner, Andreas – 2014
Wikipedia is a collaboratively-edited online encyclopaedia that relies on thousands of editors to both contribute articles and maintain their quality. Over the last years, research has extensively investigated this group of users while another group of Wikipedia users, the readers, their preferences and their behavior have not been much studied. This paper makes this group and its %their activities visible and valuable to Wikipedia's editor community. We carried out a study on two datasets covering a 13-months period to obtain insights on users preferences and reading behavior in Wikipedia. We show that the most read articles do not necessarily correspond to those frequently edited, suggesting some degree of non-alignment between user reading preferences and author editing preferences. We also identified that popular and often edited articles are read according to four main patterns, and that how an article is read may change over time. We illustrate how this information can provide valuable insights to Wikipedia's editor community.
author = {Lehmann, Janette and M\"{u}ller-Birn, Claudia and Laniado, David and Lalmas, Mounia and Kaltenbrunner, Andreas},
title = {Reader Preferences and Behavior on Wikipedia},
year = {2014},
isbn = {9781450329545},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/2631775.2631805},
doi = {10.1145/2631775.2631805},
abstract = {Wikipedia is a collaboratively-edited online encyclopaedia that relies on thousands of editors to both contribute articles and maintain their quality. Over the last years, research has extensively investigated this group of users while another group of Wikipedia users, the readers, their preferences and their behavior have not been much studied. This paper makes this group and its %their activities visible and valuable to Wikipedia's editor community. We carried out a study on two datasets covering a 13-months period to obtain insights on users preferences and reading behavior in Wikipedia. We show that the most read articles do not necessarily correspond to those frequently edited, suggesting some degree of non-alignment between user reading preferences and author editing preferences. We also identified that popular and often edited articles are read according to four main patterns, and that how an article is read may change over time. We illustrate how this information can provide valuable insights to Wikipedia's editor community.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media},
pages = {88–97},
numpages = {10},
keywords = {reader, engagement, wikipedia, article quality, reading behavior, human factors, reading interest, measurement, editor},
location = {Santiago, Chile},
series = {HT '14}
}