Martin Gerlach

Given the central importance of information seeking to human nature – epitomized by the view of humans as informavores – understanding the dynamics of how humans seek information and engage with knowledge is of key significance across disciplines, both in the basic and applied sciences. As one of the web’s primary multilingual knowledge sources with hundreds of millions of readers from across the globe, Wikipedia offers a unique opportunity to observe self-motivated information seeking beyond lab-based studies. In this talk, I will give an overview of our recent work aiming to systematically characterize the navigation of Wikipedia’s readers at scale. For example, I will show differences in the navigation strategies and how navigation is embedded in the larger online ecosystem. I will describe how the results not only empower us to better serve information needs of readers, but also how they provide us with crucial insights towards the strategic goal of knowledge equity in Wikimedia projects.

Seminar series in Computational Social Science (CSS) – at Centre Marc Bloch Berlin 

Martin Gerlach (Wikimedia Foundation)

Program of the seminar: https://cmb.huma-num.fr/css-seminar/

Contact: css-seminar-subscribe@cmb.hu-berlin.de