Hi everyone,
It's a new year and we have some fascinating research showcases lined up! The first one will be live-streamed next Wednesday, January 22, at 9:30 AM PT / 17:30 UTC. Find your local time here https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1737567000. The theme for this showcase is *Reader Attention and Curiosity*.
You are welcome to watch via the YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/live/gvF8p4r91NE. As always, you can join the conversation in the YouTube chat as soon as the showcase goes live.
This month's presentations: Collective Attention Across Wikipedia and the WebBy *Patrick Gildersleve, University of Exeter*Wikipedia, as one of the most popular websites globally, serves as an important indicator of collective attention online. Readers of news and social media often turn to Wikipedia as a secondary resource for supporting or clarifying information, and this is reflected in the patterns of page views and edits on the online encyclopaedia. Wikipedia is also not just a vast repository of information; it is a network of interconnected articles that exists within the broader ecosystem of the World Wide Web. To fully comprehend the dynamics of online popularity, we must study how individuals navigate between articles and how external platforms drive traffic to Wikipedia, not just Wikipedia articles (or alternative online records) in isolation. In this talk, I will review research on how major news events spark networked surges of collective attention to Wikipedia articles, how Twitter users both navigate and contribute to Wikipedia in response to viral social media content, and how we can combine data from Reddit and Wikipedia to study patterns of attention towards current events, influxes of traffic from social media towards Wikipedia, and the use of Wikipedia in discussions on social media.Architectural styles of curiosity in global Wikipedia mobile app readershipBy *Dale Zhou, University of California, Irvine*A historico-philosophical examination of texts over two millennia previously revealed three styles of curiosity: the wandering “busybody”, the targeted “hunter,” and the creative “dancer.” In this talk, I will review network signatures of these three styles from an analysis of 482,760 readers using Wikipedia’s mobile app in 14 languages from 50 countries or territories. By measuring the structure of knowledge networks constructed by readers weaving a thread through articles in Wikipedia, we expand upon prior work in the laboratory that found evidence for distinct knowledge network architectures constructed by each curiosity style. Moreover, we found associations, globally, between the structure of knowledge networks and population-level indicators of spatial navigation, education, mood, well-being, and inequality. This presentation will describe how these findings advance our understanding of Wikipedia’s global readership and demonstrate how cultural and geographical properties of the digital environment relate to different styles of curiosity.
Hi all,
Just a quick reminder that this month's research showcase on *Reader Attention and Curiosity* will be starting in about an hour. Please join us at https://www.youtube.com/live/gvF8p4r91NE.
Best, Kinneret
On Sat, Jan 18, 2025 at 12:00 AM Kinneret Gordon kgordon@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi everyone,
It's a new year and we have some fascinating research showcases lined up! The first one will be live-streamed next Wednesday, January 22, at 9:30 AM PT / 17:30 UTC. Find your local time here https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1737567000. The theme for this showcase is *Reader Attention and Curiosity*.
You are welcome to watch via the YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/live/gvF8p4r91NE. As always, you can join the conversation in the YouTube chat as soon as the showcase goes live.
This month's presentations: Collective Attention Across Wikipedia and the WebBy *Patrick Gildersleve, University of Exeter*Wikipedia, as one of the most popular websites globally, serves as an important indicator of collective attention online. Readers of news and social media often turn to Wikipedia as a secondary resource for supporting or clarifying information, and this is reflected in the patterns of page views and edits on the online encyclopaedia. Wikipedia is also not just a vast repository of information; it is a network of interconnected articles that exists within the broader ecosystem of the World Wide Web. To fully comprehend the dynamics of online popularity, we must study how individuals navigate between articles and how external platforms drive traffic to Wikipedia, not just Wikipedia articles (or alternative online records) in isolation. In this talk, I will review research on how major news events spark networked surges of collective attention to Wikipedia articles, how Twitter users both navigate and contribute to Wikipedia in response to viral social media content, and how we can combine data from Reddit and Wikipedia to study patterns of attention towards current events, influxes of traffic from social media towards Wikipedia, and the use of Wikipedia in discussions on social media.Architectural styles of curiosity in global Wikipedia mobile app readershipBy *Dale Zhou, University of California, Irvine*A historico-philosophical examination of texts over two millennia previously revealed three styles of curiosity: the wandering “busybody”, the targeted “hunter,” and the creative “dancer.” In this talk, I will review network signatures of these three styles from an analysis of 482,760 readers using Wikipedia’s mobile app in 14 languages from 50 countries or territories. By measuring the structure of knowledge networks constructed by readers weaving a thread through articles in Wikipedia, we expand upon prior work in the laboratory that found evidence for distinct knowledge network architectures constructed by each curiosity style. Moreover, we found associations, globally, between the structure of knowledge networks and population-level indicators of spatial navigation, education, mood, well-being, and inequality. This presentation will describe how these findings advance our understanding of Wikipedia’s global readership and demonstrate how cultural and geographical properties of the digital environment relate to different styles of curiosity.
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Kinneret Gordon
Lead Research Community Officer
Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org/