Wikipedia examined the statistical distribution of user attention

The Wikipedia online encyclopedia contains a wealth of information. Moreover, all of it is literally riddled with end-to-end links, so that having begun the study of a new wireless network protocol, you can end by reading an article about fossils of ringed worms of the lower Silurian . Employees of Wikipedia itself conducted an analysis of user clicks on the links and tried to answer the question why surfing the online encyclopedia is simply addictive to many people.

The authors of the study, first of all, studied the statistics of click-throughs. These data made it possible to understand which users and how to travel through the virtual expanses of Wikipedia. Study itselfwas conducted using data from behavioral patterns of users of the English, Russian, German, Spanish and Japanese versions of the encyclopedia.

It is worth recognizing that many users have traveled on the Wiki more than once in the strangest way. You can start by studying the plot of your favorite movie and end with an article on the uniform of the centurions of the army of Ancient Rome. But why is this happening? The fact is that most users visit Wikipedia in order to study topics, the mention of which skipped in the media resources read or viewed by the user. Well, and then, having received the information of interest, the user goes to travel to those places of Wikipedia where his curiosity leads. A person sees a link with an interesting title - and goes.

And this is not unusual - after all, the available information, which is simply a huge amount on Wikipedia, can attract the attention of anyone. It just so happened that the structure of the online encyclopedia is optimally suited for serene hours of reading. Perhaps a more convenient structure can be invented, but this is not so simple.

It is worth noting that most of the Wikipedia traffic is search services . Hundreds of millions of users are searching for something on the web and fall into Wikipedia articles. This is the beginning of the journey of most users in the virtual world of knowledge. And many users really begin this journey.

In 2015, the encyclopedia first showed the behavioral patterns of its readers, analyzing more than 7 million queries. An explanation of the data can be found here .

It is worth noting that from the moment it became widely available, information on the behavior of Wikipedia users has become the basis for a large number of scientific studies. For example, scientists have studied how Wikipedia affects user preferences in 2015 . They also studied the thematic distribution of interests of users during one session , plus data were obtained on what else can be improved so that the reader does not have any problems with his favorite pastime - the study of new materials .

A statistical study by Wiki is based on an analysis of 26 million links distributed in approximately 4.4 million articles with a total of 6.7 billion clicks. Representatives of the encyclopedia built a graph that shows how approximately the interests of users are distributed after reading articles on a certain topic.



As for the 2017 study, its results are roughly as follows:

• 60% of links (which is 15.6 million) are internal and account for 1.2 billion clicks (18%);
• 37% of links are visited by users coming from outside, for example, from the Google search results page;
• 3% of links (773k) are difficult to classify because they do not lead the user to where they promise (strictly speaking, these links allegedly lead to internal resources, but when you try to visit the site the user sees an error ").

In some cases, domains of the same subject matter remain less visited, since there are not so many links leading to the first elements of these domains, and there are also few users. Nothing can be done about it, but the developers of Wiki have been trying for a long time to understand how this problem can be solved.
In general, Wikipedia continues to evolve, so that soon the average web user will spend even more time reading her articles.