Surfin' Wikipedia: an analysis of the Wikipedia (non-random) surfer's behavior from aggregate access data

Abstract

Does the reason a user visits a Wikipedia page influence that user's subsequent browsing behavior on Wikipedia? We address this question using aggregate Wikipedia page access data. We conduct: (1) a comparison of browsing behaviors between serendipitous and directed information seekers; and (2) how topic/category influences users' migration from page to page. Our findings indicate that surfer behavior and topic are potentially influential factors, which weakens the random surfer model underlying link-based algorithms, and could affect how web designers should design sites to best meet the diversity of information seeking behaviors.