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Wikipedia is a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, collectively known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system called MediaWiki. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history, and has consistently been one of the 10 most popular websites. Created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, it is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization. Initially available only in English, versions in other languages were quickly developed. Wikipedia's combined editions comprise more than articles, attracting around 2 billion unique device visits per month and more than 15 million edits per month (about 5.8 edits per second on average) . Wikipedia has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, and culture. It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bi

How We Use Wikipedia: Studying Readers' Behavior with Navigation Traces

Tiziano Piccardi

In the information age, the Web and the growing global connectivity drastically simplified our access to information. Learning and fact-checking from online resources is nowadays part of our daily routine. Studying the dynamic associated with online content consumption is critical to understanding human behavior and informing future platforms' design. In this thesis, we provide a comprehensive overview of online knowledge-seeking, a specific instance of information-seeking, by describing the behavioral pattern of Wikipedia readers. Despite the importance and pervasiveness of Wikipedia as one of the largest platforms for open knowledge, surprisingly little is known about how people navigate and interact with its content. This thesis is organized around two major contributions. We start with a large-scale characterization of the navigation patterns on Wikipedia in English, and then we introduce the tools we developed to conduct our analyses.In the first part, we shed light on the navigation patterns with three large-scale studies based on passively collected digital traces. Using billions of requests collected in Wikipedia's logs, we measure how readers reach articles, transition between pages, and leave the platform. We provide a complete overview of the readers' behavior by characterizing the frequent navigation dynamics and the level of engagement with different types of external links on the page. Then, given the observed role of Wikipedia as a gateway to the Web, we quantify the hypothetical economic value of the traffic received by external websites.In the second part, we present the tools that we developed to make our analysis possible and support future work in this field. First, we introduce WikiPDA, a cross-lingual topic modeling method able to generate a shared topics space for all editions of Wikipedia. Then, we present WikiHist.html, an effort to make publicly available the full Wikipedia history in HTML format. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings and presenting future research opportunities enabled by our contributions.

EPFL2022

A large scale study of reader interactions with images on Wikipedia

Tiziano Piccardi

Wikipedia is the largest source of free encyclopedic knowledge and one of the most visited sites on the Web. To increase reader understanding of the article, Wikipedia editors add images within the text of the article's body. However, despite their widespread usage on web platforms and the huge volume of visual content on Wikipedia, little is known about the importance of images in the context of free knowledge environments. To bridge this gap, we collect data about English Wikipedia reader interactions with images during one month and perform the first large-scale analysis of how interactions with images happen on Wikipedia. First, we quantify the overall engagement with images, finding that one in 29 pageviews results in a click on at least one image, one order of magnitude higher than interactions with other types of article content. Second, we study what factors associate with image engagement and observe that clicks on images occur more often in shorter articles and articles about visual arts or transports and biographies of less well-known people. Third, we look at interactions with Wikipedia article previews and find that images help support reader information need when navigating through the site, especially for more popular pages. The findings in this study deepen our understanding of the role of images for free knowledge and provide a guide for Wikipedia editors and web user communities to enrich the world's largest source of encyclopedic knowledge.

SPRINGER2022

How We Use Wikipedia: Studying Readers' Behavior with Navigation Traces

Tiziano Piccardi

EPFL2022