Wikipedia Searches Reveal Differing Styles of Curiosity

Wikipedia's massive dataset helped researchers identify three styles of curiosity -- "busybody," "hunter," and "dancer" -- based on how users navigate its pages (see: wiki rabbit hole). These curiosity styles reflect broader social trends and highlight curiosity's role in connecting information rather than merely acquiring it. Scientific American reports: In this lexicon, a busybody traces a zigzagging route through many often distantly related topics. A hunter, in contrast, searches with sustained focus, moving among a relatively small number of closely related articles. A dancer links together highly disparate topics to try to synthesize new ideas. "Curiosity actually works by connecting pieces of information, not just acquiring them," says University of Pennsylvania network scientist Dani Bassett, cosenior author on a recent study of these curiosity types in Science Advances. "It's not as if we go through the world and pick up a piece of information and put it in our pockets like a stone. Instead we gather information and connect it to stuff that we already know."

The team tracked more than 482,000 people using Wikipedia's mobile app in 50 countries or territories and 14 languages. The researchers charted these users' paths using "knowledge networks" of connected information, which depict how closely one search topic (a node in the network) is related to another. Beyond just mapping the connections, they linked curiosity styles to location-based indicators of well-being, inequality, and other measures. In countries with higher education levels and greater gender equality, people browsed more like busybodies. In countries with lower scores on these variables, people browsed like hunters. Bassett hypothesizes that "in countries that have more structures of oppression or patriarchal forces, there may be a constraining of knowledge production that pushes people more toward this hyperfocus." The researchers also analyzed topics of interest, ranging from physics to visual arts, for busybodies compared with hunters (graphic). Dancer patterns, more recently confirmed, were excluded. Editor note: This article was published on December 24, 2024, based on a study published in October, 2024.

So, Wikipedia tracks its users

[blahabl]

"The team tracked more than 482,000 people using Wikipedia's mobile app in 50 countries or territories and 14 languages."

I for one would be more interested in what other data is being collected, how it is being stored, who has access to it, and so on, more than this nonsense about "hunters" and "dancers".

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[ShanghaiBill]

The information collected is what you enter into the app and your interactions with it.

But don't get your panties in a twist. It is opt-in.

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[blahabl]

The information collected is what you enter into the app and your interactions with it.

Exactly same thing can be said about, you know, every privacy-raping app in existence. Windows also sends to mothership "oh, only whatever you type into the OS, and all your interactions with it"

But don't get your panties in a twist. It is opt-in.

Okay, at least there's that. That also makes the cited results completely worthless due to the epic selection bias, but whatever.

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[xack]

They've always tracked their users with "checkuser". So many good editors were banned due to sharing an IP address with a vandal. They have blocked the entire T-Mobile US and Three UK mobile networks because of overzealous checkusers. They claim not to "bite" the "newcomers" but ANI and SPI are full of teeth. Even Wikipediocracy has banned me for speaking out against Wikipedia.