User:Bluerasberry/Readership of Wikipedia



The Readership of Wikipedia is Wikipedia's audience. Various studies have described Wikipedia as the world's most popular reference source. In 2007, commentators began including Wikipedia in lists of top-10 websites by web traffic. Most readers arrive at Wikipedia by following a search engine, although large numbers also arrive through social media. Wikipedia is remarkable as a gateway which channels its readers to examine the sources which Wikipedia editors have cited. The reader click-through rate is about 1/30 for Wikipedia images and 1/300 for citations. Research topics in discussing Wikipedia's readers include how many people read Wikipedia, demographics of readers, reader interest in particular categories of Wikipedia articles, the extent of Wikipedia engagement among readers, how credible readers find Wikipedia, and critiques of technological tools which interact with Wikipedia to provide additional insights to readers.

Wikipedia has a global and multilingual readership. Research identifies trends among Wikipedia readers for demographics including gender, country, wealth, languages used, and educational background. Health information on Wikipedia is an especially examined area where researchers have compiled evidence that patients, medical students, and doctors all routinely consult Wikipedia.

In Wikipedia, humans and technology combine to form a social machine which produces media. Since Wikipedia is a user-generated content platform, its content contributors are a portion of the readership. While much research examines Wikipedia editor behavior, there is less available research on Wikipedia's readers. Part of the explanation for the lack of research on readers is that Wikipedia provides privacy to its readers, and consequently, reader click path and session time data are not generally available.

Size
In 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation anticipated that there would be more than 1,000,000,000 Wikipedia users in 2015. In the 2017 annual report the Wikimedia Foundation claimed to have served billions of readers. In 2018, a report in The Independent noted that Wikipedia's own internal reporting counts 1.4 billion unique devices accessing Wikipedia every month.

Various commentators have remarked on Wikipedia's web traffic ranking in comparison to other websites. In 2005, Jimmy Wales shared that Wikipedia was a top 50 website. Wikipedia's Alexa Internet ranking was #37 in 2006, #11 in 2007, #7 in 2009, #7 in 2015, and #13 in 2021. For the month of December 2006 Comscore ranked Wikipedia as the #6 website globally with 165,000,000 global unique users and the #9 website in the United States with 43 million unique users.

In 2005, Hitwise reported that Wikipedia was the #2 reference website after Dictionary.com and the most popular encyclopedia, ahead of About.com as #2.

In December, 2022, Similarweb ranked Wikipedia the 7th most trafficked site on the global Internet.

Demographics
Two-thirds of Wikipedia readers are men. Also, men view more articles than women in a typical Wikipedia reading session. While critics frequently discuss various sorts of gender bias on Wikipedia, as of 2021 there are not well developed explanations for why men and women differ so much in their interest for Wikipedia content. Men read more Wikipedia articles on sports, games, and mathematics. Women read more articles about television shows and medicine. Biographies are popular with everyone and account for a third of Wikipedia visits, but men are more likely to read biographies of men and women are more likely to read biographies of women. No strong readership trends are identified for non-binary gender people.

When readers in countries with a higher Human Development Index navigate through several articles in Wikipedia, they tend to spend more time on the last article they visit. The likely explanation is that these readers stop browsing Wikipedia after finding an article which choose to read. It is not certain why readers in countries with less development do not have the same behavior, but a possible explanation is that since many Wikipedia language versions have underdeveloped content, the last article these readers examine does not contain the information they want. In comparing geographical distribution of readers, people in the Global South tend to have longer reading sessions.

A basic factor which determines whether people read Wikipedia is their ease of accessing it at all. Communities with less Internet access have fewer Wikipedia readers. Countries with government censorship of Wikipedia have fewer readers. Some people still read and share prohibited content.

Factors which influence the popularity of a given Wikipedia language version include the number of articles in that language version, the degree of Internet engagement of that language community, and the extent to which that language community already uses other language versions of Wikipedia. A 2016 study generalized trends in various Wikipedia language communities by noting that current events are popular in English language Wikipedia, Japanese readers seek pop culture, Spanish readers consume more sports content, and Russian readers seek information about social media websites.

Representatives of Wikipedia's governance process have opposed and resisted governmental requests that Wikipedia adopt an age verification system to restrict minors from accessing Wikipedia.

Arriving and browsing
Search engines routinely rank Wikipedia highly on the search engine results page following a user web query. Most readers arrive at Wikipedia when they are looking for information online, and a search engine recommends Wikipedia to answer their question. Search tools which popularize Wikipedia include Google Search, Amazon Alexa, Siri, and DuckDuckGo. When search engines direct their users to Wikipedia articles, then that relationship improves the experience that users have with that search engine, and it also results in high traffic to Wikipedia.

Active discussions in the news or social media drive traffic to Wikipedia. 60-70% of readers end their session after reviewing the article they requested. The remaining readers access multiple Wikipedia articles by following hyperlinks in whatever text they are reading. Wikipedia articles generally receive more traffic when other high-traffic Wikipedia articles hyperlink to them. Readers often return to articles which they have previously read.

Wikipedia readers report higher satisfaction than is usual for audiences of comparable media sources. Typically when readers are dissatisfied in a media platform, researchers can use conventional analysis to identify the problem which those readers experienced. In contrast, both satisfied and dissatisfied Wikipedia readers have similar behavior, which makes detecting problems in Wikipedia more challenging.

General reading patterns
A 2016 survey of 5000 Wikipedia readers found that half of them were visiting Wikipedia articles on familiar topics, while the other half were learning a new topic. Half of the readers came to Wikipedia to read more about something they saw elsewhere in the media, or which they had just discussed with another person. Other commonly reported reasons for using Wikipedia included students using it to supplement their school projects, reading for entertainment or pastime, wanting to learn something new, or using Wikipedia to inform a particular decision that a person was making. 80% of readers were either trying to get an overview of a topic or do quick fact-checking, while 20% of readers were trying to understand a topic deeply and spent more time reading. On weekdays and in the daytime readers use Wikipedia for work or school, whereas on nights and evenings people use Wikipedia in response to media and social discussions. For English Wikipedia, traffic peaks every day during the afternoon in the United States.

One study examined time spent in Wikipedia by many users in various Wikipedia language versions for the one-year period starting November 2017 and ending October 2018. One finding of that study was that although the length of the median user session on Wikipedia was 25 seconds, the average user session was more than a minute. One interpretation of this is that there are different users visiting Wikipedia for different purposes, with some leaving quickly after arrival and some having significantly longer reading sessions. The total amount of time spent reading Wikipedia by all humanity in that year was about 700,000 years.

Wikipedia readers include those who need to learn how to do or use things where they cannot otherwise find freely available content. Reading 10 or more Wikipedia articles in a session is uncommonly high reading interest, but because Wikipedia has a large audience, there are still tens of millions of sessions where readers do this. Readers tend to start their Wikipedia reading session at a popular article, and if they browse further, they tend to end their reading session at a less-developed and less popular article.

Interest in topics


Major news events and social trends result in increased traffic to related Wikipedia articles. Similarly, when public figures are in the news, then traffic to their Wikipedia biographies increases. New editors may begin contributing information to Wikipedia in an attempt to reach all these readers. Deaths of public figures can result in especially high Wikipedia readership. Among Wikipedia editors there is prestige in making a report which gets lots of traffic, such as being the person to add news of a person's death to their Wikipedia biography. Media reports of celebrity death or disease experiences drive traffic to related Wikipedia medical articles.

Wikipedia invites Internet activism on the premise that editors can use Wikipedia as a channel for distributing information to readers. Activists have organized Wikipedia information campaigns for feminism,   cultural heritage, climate change, LGBT culture,   science communication, and cultural or language communities which are underrepresented on the Internet. University research programs have described Wikipedia editing activism as attractive to students. Data analysis can combine the individual activist contributions of many Wikipedia editors into aggregate reports or visualizations which represent entire fields of information.

A 2015 study reported that pageviews to health information on Wikipedia made it the most popular source of health information, exceeding traffic to websites for the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, and the National Health Service, as well as for WebMD. A 2020 systematic review of health research concluded that Wikipedia is a popular health information resource due to its large audience of health information readers. Evidence has established that the number of patients, medical students, and doctors who read Wikipedia is large enough to consider Wikipedia a significant channel for health communication. Various researchers have examined Wikipedia readers to medical articles for specific topics. Traffic by language reflects the interest of that language community in the topic.

Lawyers and judges read Wikipedia in their professional practice. Citations to Wikipedia and text copied from Wikipedia appear in judicial opinions. People in courtrooms read and discuss what Wikipedia says to share general information on whatever topics are relevant in a trial.

Researchers can examine the popularity of Wikipedia articles in various languages by reviewing Wikipedia article pageview statistics. Commentators who have reviewed popular Wikipedia articles by time period or topic include Pew Research Center, Yahoo!, BuzzFeed, Crunchyroll, Gizmodo, First Monday, and India Times.

At times, it can be a mystery as to why people read or access topics. A study which examined hoaxes on Wikipedia reported that some longstanding hoaxes in low-traffic articles had received a total of 10,000 pageviews over years before discovery, and that high traffic articles are less likely to include hoaxes.

Wikipedia as a gateway
Wikipedia articles feature image thumbnails. Readers click those images to access image metadata and higher quality image versions at a rate of 1 image per 30 article views. In comparison, readers click through links other than images at a rate of 1 in 300. Readers are more likely to click on images that are interesting, such as those in visual arts, or which are complicated, such as maps or diagrams. In many media platforms, readers enjoy clicking on familiar celebrity faces, but in Wikipedia, celebrity images have lower reader engagement. Wikipedia readers more often click on portraits of less known people.

Wikipedia includes external links which readers may use to exit Wikipedia and access content at other websites. When readers leave Wikipedia to access content elsewhere, they do so in equal amounts through links in Wikipedia infoboxes, the cited sources in the references section, or through the external links section.

Readers more often use external links in Wikipedia when it leads them to a site with quality content collections. Library resources are popular resources which Wikipedia readers access through exit links from Wikipedia. Various commentators have noted that Wikipedia editors and readers prefer links to open access free resources in favor of links to closed paywall content.

Wikipedia is unusual for being a public resource which provides general audiences with citations to scholarly sources. Citation use in Wikipedia is extensive. Readers access citations at rate of 1 per 300 Wikipedia pageviews. Readers are more likely to check citations in this way for Wikipedia articles which are shorter, lower quality, presenting current events, and when the sources themselves are open access. Readers who examine the citations in the reference list often do not click through to read the original sources; instead, they verify that the cited source is from a reputable publisher or authority. Wikipedia readers examine scholarly sources for medical and non-medical topics at the same rate.

Readers are also contributors
Wikipedia is a media platform which invites readers to contribute user-generated content. Most readers simply consume Wikipedia's media without actively choosing to contribute content. Nevertheless, because of Wikipedia's nature and design, those readers are also passively contributing the project. One way that all readers contribute to Wikipedia is by increasing the pageview count of whatever they read, as Wikipedia counts the number of visitors to all of its pages. Because of this, each time a reader accessing an article, they support Wikipedia by demonstrating their interest and helping editors identify which topics Wikipedia readers want.

Additionally, Wikipedia readers over time tend to learn about Wikipedia's mission, editorial practices, and its distinctness as a media platform. Even without actively editing, those who use Wikipedia and learn how it works are engaging in "legitimate peripheral participation", which in Wikipedia's case means that there are a significant number of people who understand and can discuss Wikipedia without themselves being editors. Wikipedia is sometimes criticized for having a free-rider problem of readers who never contribute, but a counterargument is that Wikipedia has found ways to benefit from readers in ways which traditional media sources do not. A survey of people who contribute images and photography to Wikimedia Commons, which is the image repository serving Wikipedia, found that many of them became contributors after being inspired by images which they found as Wikipedia readers.

At the time of Wikipedia's establishment in 2001, concepts such as Web 2.0, social media, and user-generated content were new and unfamiliar ideas. Contemporary descriptions of Wikipedia emphasized and explained that it was possible for readers to visit Wikipedia as a website and publication, and for those readers to also become editors who produce Wikipedia content for others. Many researchers have written many descriptions of Wikipedia as a complex social and media ecosystem where content creators and readers interact. Wikipedia's readers and Wikipedia editors have different interests. A study classified Wikipedia articles by popularity among readers versus development by editors. This study found that commonly, articles may be popular with readers but lack editors interested in developing them. Conversely it is common for Wikipedia editors to develop articles in the absence of reader interest.

Wikimedia ecosystem
Among the set of Wikimedia projects, Wikipedia is the encyclopedia, while each of the other projects have their own specialty focus. Images from the Wikimedia Commons image repository appear throughout Wikipedia as illustrations. While readers may browse the complete media collection in Wikimedia Commons, all of Commons' media is free content, and consequently, anyone can and many people do reuse this media in other publications. Economic analysts have estimated the value of Wikimedia Commons images as billions of United States dollars, because of the market rates for stock photography, the high rate of reuse from Wikimedia Commons, and the frequency with which readers encounter these images outside of the Wikimedia platform. A 2022 report said that there was not much available research about reader engagement with Wikimedia images, but that the available datasets are rich, and that researchers could use that data to ask and answer questions in various fields of study.

Wikidata contributors curate the sort of data which they believe would be useful to share in Wikipedia articles, but as data in Wikidata is not easy for humans to read, much of it is inaccessible. Wikidata tools are in development to connect Wikidata content for presentation in Wikipedia, which would support Wikipedia readers who want but cannot access this content. Analysis of Wiktionary reader use reveals patterns of dictionary use which signal reactions to events in the broader media environment. Reviewers have imagined Wikiversity as a place where readers may learn through online classes. Reports of Wikiversity outcomes are from instructors who invited students into the lessons they organized there. Wishes for the readership to become editors are central to the critiques and reviews of the Wikimedia projects Wikinews, Wikivoyage,  and Wikisource.

Wikipedia pageviews
Wikipedia publishes the pageviews of its articles. Wikipedia's public reports show how many times its audience has requested any article, in any language, in any given hour. For example, a study of Wikipedia's coverage of climate change found that from 2017-2022, readers made 500 million visits to 4000 Wikipedia articles in 25 languages.

A study in 2007 claimed that Wikipedia was so popular that its web traffic data gave insight to broad public interest on many topics. That study argued that Wikipedia pageview data could be the the basis for impact evaluation of Wikipedia's coverage of various topics. Various later studies have confirmed that Wikipedia's articles are very popular, and that Wikipedia mirrors trends in public interest, and that content in Wikipedia affects public understanding broadly. Wikipedia pageview counts are often high enough to serve as evidence that Wikipedia is a popular media source for many topics. Also, because so many individual people use Wikipedia, its pageviews can be imagined as statistical sampling of how many times a member of the public wants information on a given topic.

Various studies have observed a relationship between Wikipedia pageviews and cultural trends in society. Individual studies reported connections between Wikipedia traffic and popular interest in animals,    chemicals, elections, investments,  cultural heritage, natural heritage,  and general commercial interest. Numerous studies have examined traffic to health information on Wikipedia. News media trends drive traffic to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia as a reusable data set
Artificial intelligence in Wikimedia projects includes data science projects which use Wikipedia as a data set. Wikipedia is unusual for being a nonprofit project which shares free content which anyone can use for any purpose.

The Google Knowledge Graph is an example of a product which has copied Wikipedia, and which presents Wikipedia content as a zero-click result to people who do not actually visit Wikipedia. Since the 2022 advent of ChatGPT along with other artificial intelligence applications, many readers consume Wikipedia content through third-party applications. This happens when artificial intelligence tool developers take Wikipedia's free content, incorporate this Wikipedia knowledge into their products, and then present Wikipedia information to readers. People who consume Wikipedia information through third-party sources are typically unaware of its origin. An estimate by SimilarWeb reported that readers consumed Wikipedia content 3 billion times through Google Knowledge Graph in 2019.

Private data
A 2015 review of research on Wikipedia's readers remarked that there was much research on editor behavior, but little on reader behavior. That review explained that click path and session time data were difficult for researchers to access, but that this data was desirable.

Whereas many websites apply computer and network surveillance to their users, Wikipedia does much less of this. Wikipedia values information privacy, and consequently, Wikipedia's governance prohibits some common types of analysis which other digital platforms allow. Even privately, Wikipedia does not routinely collect click path data or conventional personal data for individual users.

The Wikimedia Foundation took measurements of reader time spent in Wikipedia in 2017. Also in 2017, there was a survey which collected responses from 30,000 Wikipedia readers asking why they were reading. A 2019 survey of Wikipedia readers collected demographic data.

External tools
The measurement of traffic to Wikipedia articles can contribute to predictive modelling. Various researchers have used Wikipedia pageview reports of politicians in political forecasting of election outcomes,   identifying emerging infectious disease or other health interests,    or as market research on consumer interest.

Sometimes popular technological resources arbitrarily use Wikipedia as an example for showcasing functions, and those examples drive readers into Wikipedia.

Links

 * stats.wikimedia.org, internal automated reporting including readership counts
 * meta:Traffic reporting - internal documentation of Wikimedia traffic reporting practices
 * Pageviews, a traffic reporting tool
 * meta:Research:Characterizing Wikipedia Reader Behaviour

Category:Wikipedia Category:Web analytics