Research:Characterizing Wikipedia Reader Behaviour/Human development index and Wikipedia use cases

Understanding the Wikipedia use cases through the taxonomy of Wikipedia readers requires understanding the context in which readers live beyond their language. Therefore, we looked into country specific statistics that can help us expand our understanding of Wikipedia readers. More specifically, we studied the survey responses in the context of socio-economic status, human development status, and cultural dimensions.

Through this part of the research we observe that,

• readers from less developed countries (as measured by Human Development Index or socio-economic status indicators such as Gross Domestic Product or the percentage of adults with secondary education) are more likely to be reading Wikipedia in-depth and more motivated by work or school projects or intrinsic learning. They also more often read scientifically oriented topics such as math, physics, technology, research and education, medicine and biology.
• readers from more developed countries are more often in Wikipedia for fact-checking and their motivations are triggered more often by media. These readers read more often entertainment related topics such as media culture, numbers, lists, and sports.
• minority language readers come to Wikipedia more often for intrinsic learning.
• readers in countries with more collectivistic societies (as measured by individualism dimension of Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory) are less likely to be motivated to visit Wikipedia by media. Instead, they are motivated by work or school related projects. We observe weak to moderate correlations using the other dimensions: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, long-term orientation, and indulgence.

See Also

• Academic paper, which includes more specific results and details of the methodology used: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.00474