Ellen Phiddian
Cosmos science journalist
How many Wikipedia tabs do you have open at the moment? I’ve got 12 lined up on mobile, with topics ranging from the ancient Hanging Gardens of Babylon, to penicillin, to the 1999 film Cruel Intentions.
According to a new study, this means I have very strong “busybody” tendencies.
Researchers have analysed the Wikipedia history of nearly half a million readers in 50 countries, and found 3 broad styles of curiosity.
The study, done by US researchers and members of the Wikimedia foundation, is published in Science Advances.
The team had previously run lab-based studies with US volunteers, and found they browsed in 2 general ways: “busybody” and “hunter”.
“The busybody loves any and all kinds of newness, they’re happy to jump from here to there, with seemingly no rhyme or reason,” says co-author Professor Dani Bassett, from the department of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. (Guilty as charged.)
“This is contrasted by the ‘hunter,’ which is a more goal-oriented, focused person who seeks to solve a problem, find a missing factor, or fill out a model of the world.”
In this study, the team broadened their scope to the browsing histories of 482,760 people using Wikipedia’s mobile app, spanning 14 languages and 50 countries.
This showed them the existence of a third type of Wiki-curiosity: “dancer”.
“The dancer is someone who moves along a track of information but, unlike the busybody, they make leaps between ideas in a creative, choreographed way,” says co-author Professor Perry Zurn, a philosopher at American University, USA.
“They don’t jump randomly; they connect different domains to create something new.”
The team found that these styles of searcher varied from country to country.
“We observed that countries that had greater inequality, in terms of gender and access to education, had people who were browsing with more intent – seeking closely related information,” says Bassett.
“The people in countries that had more equality were browsing expansively, with more diversity in topics – jumping from topic to topic and collecting loosely connected information.
“While we don’t know exactly why this is, we have our hunches, and we believe these findings will prove useful in helping scientists in our field better understand the nature of curiosity.”
This research could also help researchers in education and AI.
“What this tells us is that people – and likely children – have different curiosity styles, and that might affect how they approach learning,” says Bassett.
“A child with a hunter-like curiosity may struggle if assessed using methods that favour the busybody style, or vice versa. Understanding these styles could help us tailor educational experiences to better support individual learning paths.”
“Imparting notions of curiosity to AI systems learning from interactions is an increasingly important area of research,” says co-author Shubhankar Patankar, a doctoral student in engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.
The team is also interested in learning if other factors shape a person’s curiosity style.
“One question I’m particularly interested in is whether people browse differently at different times of day—perhaps they’re more hunter-like in the morning and more like busybodies in the evening,” says Bassett.
“Wikipedia is a very special place on the internet,” says co-author Dr David Lydon-Staley, a researcher in communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
“The site features exclusively free content and no commercial advertisements. Much of the rest of the contemporary digital landscape is designed to activate individuals’ buying impulses and customises our media content.
“This raises the question of how much we are in charge of where our curiosity takes us in online contexts beyond Wikipedia.”
