Wikipedia has studied the statistical distribution of user attention

The Wikipedia online encyclopedia contains a wealth of information. At the same time, it is literally permeated with cross-cutting links, so by starting a study of the wireless network protocol, you can finish reading the article on fossil ringed worms of the lower Silurian . The staff of Wikipedia itself conducted an analysis of user clicks on the links and tried to answer the question of why many people simply surfing the online encyclopedia.

The authors of the study, first of all, studied the statistics of the transitions on the links. This data made it possible to understand which users and how travel the virtual spaces of Wikipedia. The study itself was conducted using data from the behavioral patterns of users of the English, Russian, German, Spanish and Japanese versions of the encyclopedia.

We have to admit that many users more than once traveled on the Wiki in a strange way. You can start by studying the plot of the film you like and end with an article about the uniform of the centurions of the army of Ancient Rome. But why is this happening? The fact is that the majority of users visit Wikipedia in order to study the topic, the mention of which slipped in the media resources read or viewed by the user. Well, 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 proceeds.

And there is nothing unusual in this - because the available information, which is simply a huge amount on Wikipedia, can attract the attention of anyone. It so happens that the structure of the online encyclopedia is best suited for undisturbed hours of reading. Perhaps a more convenient structure can be invented, but this is not so easy to do.

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

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

It is worth noting that since getting into wide access, information about the behavior of Wikipedia users has become the basis for a large amount of scientific research. For example, scientists have studied how Wikipedia affects user preferences in 2015 . The thematic distribution of users' interests during a single session was also studied, plus information was obtained on what else can be improved so that the reader does not have any problems with his favorite activity - the study of new materials .

A statistical study conducted 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 the graph, which shows how roughly the interests of users are distributed after reading articles on specific topics.



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

• 60% of links (and this is 15.6 million) are internal and total 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, since they do not lead the user to where they promise (strictly speaking, these links allegedly lead to internal resources, but when they try to visit the site, the user sees an error ").

In some cases, the domains of the same subject matter remain scarcely 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 yet, but the Wiki developers have long been trying to figure out how to solve this problem.
In general, Wikipedia continues to evolve, so that the average user of the network will soon take even longer to read its articles.