Wikipedia, an addition for the ages :)

Oh dear! Oh dear,! I shall be late! - White Rabbit: Alice in Wonderland

Wikipedia, an addiction for the ages :), is a resource this rube depends on as said environment is self correcting due to the fact the world's dictionary's constantly updated and corrected by dedicated fact checkers and researchers as needs warrant, something truly wonderful in a age filled with bogus data, increasingly generated by AI. With this being said, The Conversation has an interesting piece, indirectly channeling Lewis J. Carroll, in describing how people like us access an environment both trusted and loved in a way unable to be described unless one uses Wikipedia as often as yours truly.

To whit.

If you’ve ever gone to look up a quick fact and just kept browsing from one article (or page, or video), to another, to another – then you know the feeling of “going down a rabbit hole”. This experience of curiosity-led online wandering has become synonymous with the free, user-created encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is today one of the world’s most popular websites. With more users than Amazon, Netflix, TikTok or ChatGPT, the site is a go-to source for people to learn about and discover new interests.

In new research involving more than 480,000 Wikipedia users in 14 languages across 50 countries, US researchers led by Dale Zhou at the University of Pennsylvania studied three distinctly different ways of going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. These “curiosity styles” have been studied before, but not in such a large, diverse group of people using Wikipedia “naturalistically”, in daily life.

The research may help us better understand the nature and importance of curiosity, its connections to wellbeing, and strategies for preventing the spread of false information.

Illustration of a wiki rabbit hole for a t-shirt

The Rabbit Hole beckons :)

Busybodys, hunters and dancers

The new study explores the “knowledge networks” associated with the three main styles of curiosity: busybody, hunter and dancer. A knowledge network is a visual representation of how readers “weave a thread” across Wikipedia articles.

As the researchers explain:

The busybody scouts for loose threads of novelty, the hunter pursues specific answers in a projectile path, and the dancer leaps in creative breaks with tradition across typically siloed areas of knowledge.

Earlier research had shown evidence of busybodies and hunters, and speculated about the existence of dancers. The new study confirms that busybodies and hunters exist in multiple countries and languages. It also details the dancer style, which has been more elusive to document.

Yours truly, as my loyal readers know, is a cross between hunter & dancer. :)

The researchers also identified geographical differences between curiosity styles.

In all 14 languages studied, busybodies tend to read more about culture, media, food, art, philosophy and religion. Hunters in 12 out of 14 languages tend to read more about science, technology, engineering and maths.

In German and English, hunters were more drawn to pages about history and society than busybodies. The opposite was true in Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Dutch and Chinese.

Dancers were identified by their forward leaps between disparate topics, as well as the diversity of their interests.

Contribute to Wikipedia, it's the right thing to do. :)