A survey, from the Handbook of Computational Social Science, of what large-scale behavioral data reveals about how people consume knowledge on Wikipedia. Organized around three stages of a reading session: how readers reach the platform (search engines dominate incoming traffic, with referral and interdependence effects), how they navigate within it (natural clickstream versus targeted navigation, the frequent reliance on external search over internal links, and curiosity-driven navigation styles), and how they leave. Draws on clickstream releases, server logs, and navigation games such as Wikispeedia, and outlines open problems for studying online knowledge-seeking.
The Web has drastically simplified our access to knowledge and learning, and fact-checking online resources has become a part of our daily routine. Studying online knowledge consumption is thus criti…