TY - GEN
T1 - Inspiration, captivation, and misdirection
T2 - 9th International Conference on Complex Networks, CompleNet 2018
AU - Gildersleve, Patrick
AU - Yasseri, Taha
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Springer International Publishing AG 2018.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - The World Wide Web (WWW) has fundamentally changed the ways billions of people are able to access information. Thus, understanding how people seek information online is an important issue of study. Wikipedia is a hugely important part of information provision on the Web, with hundreds of millions of users browsing and contributing to its network of knowledge. The study of navigational behavior on Wikipedia, due to the site’s popularity and breadth of content, can reveal more general information seeking patterns that may be applied beyond Wikipedia and the Web. Our work addresses the relative shortcomings of existing literature in relating how information structure influences patterns of navigation online. We study aggregated clickstream data for articles on the English Wikipedia in the form of a weighted, directed navigational network. We introduce two parameters that describe how articles act to source and spread traffic through the network, based on their in/out strength and entropy. From these, we construct a navigational phase space where different article types occupy different, distinct regions, indicating how the structure of information online has differential effects on patterns of navigation. Finally, we go on to suggest applications for this analysis in identifying and correcting deficiencies in the Wikipedia page network that may also be adapted to more general information networks.
AB - The World Wide Web (WWW) has fundamentally changed the ways billions of people are able to access information. Thus, understanding how people seek information online is an important issue of study. Wikipedia is a hugely important part of information provision on the Web, with hundreds of millions of users browsing and contributing to its network of knowledge. The study of navigational behavior on Wikipedia, due to the site’s popularity and breadth of content, can reveal more general information seeking patterns that may be applied beyond Wikipedia and the Web. Our work addresses the relative shortcomings of existing literature in relating how information structure influences patterns of navigation online. We study aggregated clickstream data for articles on the English Wikipedia in the form of a weighted, directed navigational network. We introduce two parameters that describe how articles act to source and spread traffic through the network, based on their in/out strength and entropy. From these, we construct a navigational phase space where different article types occupy different, distinct regions, indicating how the structure of information online has differential effects on patterns of navigation. Finally, we go on to suggest applications for this analysis in identifying and correcting deficiencies in the Wikipedia page network that may also be adapted to more general information networks.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85054744618&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-73198-8_23
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-73198-8_23
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85054744618
SN - 9783319731971
T3 - Springer Proceedings in Complexity
SP - 271
EP - 282
BT - Springer Proceedings in Complexity
A2 - Cornelius, Sean
A2 - Coronges, Kate
A2 - Goncalves, Bruno
A2 - Sinatra, Roberta
A2 - Vespignani, Alessandro
PB - Springer Science and Business Media B.V.
Y2 - 5 March 2018 through 8 March 2018
ER -