There was lately a lot of research about making Wikipedia's usability better for editing.
Is there any research about the way in which Wikipedia's Actual Readers use hyperlinks in Wikipedia, both internal and external?
I am wondering about it, because you know, we have Manual of Style for internal and external links, essays about the pros and cons of red links, bots that remove over-linking etc. - yet time after time i meet Actual Readers that tell me that they didn't understand a word in an article, even though this word was linked to a good article that explained its meaning. But they didn't click it and because of that they gave up on understanding the whole article.
If One Stupid Reader would tell me such a thing, i wouldn't mind, but Many Clever Readers told me that. Did anyone try to think about it deeply?