If you’ve ever gone to look up a quick fact and just kept browsing from one article (or page, or video), to another, to another—then you know the feeling of “going down a rabbit hole”. This experience of curiosity-led online wandering has become synonymous with the free, user-created encyclopedia Wikipedia. Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is today one of the world’s most popular websites.
With more users than Amazon, Netflix, TikTok or ChatGPT, the site is a go-to source for people to learn about and discover new interests. In new research involving more than 480,000 Wikipedia users in 14 languages across 50 countries, US researchers led by Dale Zhou at the University of Pennsylvania studied three distinctly different ways of going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. These “curiosity styles” have been studied before, but not in such a large, diverse group of people using Wikipedia “naturalistically”, in daily life.
The research may help us better understand the nature and importance of curiosity, its connections to wellbeing, and strategies for preventing the spread of false information. When Wikipedia was new in the early 2000s, it sparked controversies. People such as librarians and lecturers voiced concerns about Wikipedia’s potential for platforming untrue or incomplete information.
Today, the factuality of Wikipedia’s existing contents is less concerning than questions of bias, such as which topics the site’s volunteer editors deem noteworthy enough to inc.
