Wikipedia Searches Reveal Differing Styles of Curiosity

Wikipedia Searches Reveal Differing Styles of Curiosity

By Gary Stix edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier

The website Wikipedia describes curiosity as a “quality related to inquisitive thinking, such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident in humans and other animals.” But there is a lot more to this prime motivator for so much of human behavior—and Wikipedia, as the world’s largest encyclopedia, is now helping social scientists deepen the definition of curiosity.

Tracing how Wikipedia searchers flit among topics and lose themselves in Wiki rabbit holes revealed three different styles of human inquisitiveness: the “busybody,” the “hunter” and the “dancer.”

“Curiosity actually works by connecting pieces of information, not just acquiring them.” —Dani Bassett, University of Pennsylvania

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In this lexicon, a busybody traces a zigzagging route through many often distantly related topics. A hunter, in contrast, searches with sustained focus, moving among a relatively small number of closely related articles. A dancer links together highly disparate topics to try to synthesize new ideas. “Curiosity actually works by connecting pieces of information, not just acquiring them,” says University of Pennsylvania network scientist Dani Bassett, co­senior author on a recent study of these curiosity types in Science Advances. “It’s not as if we go through the world and pick up a piece of information and put it in our pockets like a stone. Instead we gather information and connect it to…