User:Rjjiii/How do folks read Wikipedia?
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 | This is an essay on Wikipedia. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community. |
 | This page in a nutshell: How does research say folks read Wikipedia? |
Citations
- For every ~300 pageviews, one reference is clicked through.[1]
- Citations are clicked more often on lower quality articles and less-often on higher quality articles.[1]
- PDF icon citations are opened more often.[1]
- Open access citations are opened more often.[1]
- Recent citations are opened more often.[1]
- College undergrads prioritize ease of access over the reliability of the source.[2]
- 2 out of 3 college undergrads say they would not follow any link in a Wikipedia article's bibliography.[2]
- Readers are more likely to follow references when there is a single section ("References") as opposed to two sections ("Notes" and "References"). They reported multiple reference sections as confusing.[2]
- One reason given for not reading references linked in a Wikipedia article, was that the student was not reading the Wikipedia article either (just skimming for facts).[2]
- Undergrads were most likely to click through a reference that was higher up on the reference list (cited earlier in the article). Whether a reference was a scholarly or peer-reviewed source had no impact on choice.[2]
- On medical articles, readers were more likely to check the citation (hovering over the footnote to trigger the popup) in order to evaluate a claim, but they were less likely to actually click the citation to read the cited source.[3]
Links
- Links in the lead are the most likely to be clicked, followed by links in the infobox.[4][5]
- Official site links in infoboxes have a click-through rate of 2.47%. These are the most-clicked external links in articles by a large margin.[6]
- The click-through rate was 0.03% on reference links, and 0.14% on links in the body text.[6]
- The cost to generate the traffic from official links in a Wikipedia article via advertisements would be about 7 to 13 million dollars on average.[6]
Images
- Images are paid less attention on longer articles, and more attention on shorter articles.[7]
- Readers are less likely to click through on a wikilink if there is an image in the popup page preview.[7]
- Images are paid more attention on articles with good readability, and less attention on articles with poor readability.[7]
- Images are paid more attention when they depict geographic locations, art, science, maps, transportation, and the military.[7]
- Complex images are paid more attention.[7]
- Familiar images are paid more attention.[7]
Reading
- After reading a Wikipedia article, a college undergrad is most likely to seek more information from a Google search.[2]
- About 40% of mobile web readers expand any section when reading an article.[8]
- The majority of mobile web readers scroll at least once when reading an article.[9]
- Over a week's time, 25% mobile app readers scrolled to the bottom of at least one article.[10]
- An eye-tracking study found readers focused more attention on hyper-linked words.[11]
- Readers from the Global South were more likely to read an article all the way through.[12]