2019:Research/Dwelling on Wikipedia Investigating time spent by global encyclopedia readers

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Research/Dwelling on Wikipedia Investigating time spent by global encyclopedia readers

Curie · Friday 12:15 - 12:40

Abstract

Much existing knowledge about global consumption of peer-produced information goods is supported by data on Wikipedia page view counts and surveys. In 2017, the Wikimedia Foundation began measuring the time readers spend on a given page view (dwell time), enabling a more detailed  understanding of such reading patterns. In this paper, we validate and model this new data source and, building on existing findings, use regression analysis to test hypotheses about how patterns in reading time vary between global contexts. Consistent with prior findings from self-report data, our complementary analysis of behavioral data provides evidence that  Global South readers are more likely to use Wikipedia to gain in-depth understanding of a topic. We find that Global South readers spend more time per page view and that this difference is amplified on desktop devices, which are thought to be  better suited for in-depth information seeking tasks.

Authors

Nathan TeBlunthuis (University of Washington)

Tilman Bayer (Wikimedia Foundation)

Olga Vasileva (Wikimedia Foundation)

Relevance to Wikimedia Community

If you've ever had curiosity about questions like:

• How long does humanity spend reading in a given year?
• How long do you think a typical visitor spends on a page? Can they read much in that time?
• Are longer pages generally read more?
• What are the differences between readers on mobile and desktop devices?
• What are the differences between readers in the Global South and readers in the Global North?

Then this talk is for you!

This talk is about a statistical analysis of data collected and conducted at the WMF.

Session type

22-min presentation.

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Slides