Wikipedia search reveals different styles of curiosity

Wikipedia search reveals different styles of curiosity

Written by Gary Stix Edited by Sarah Lewin Frazier

The website Wikipedia describes curiosity as “a quality associated with exploratory thinking, such as exploration, investigation, and learning, found in humans and other animals.” But there’s more to this primary motivation for many human behaviors, and Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia, is now helping social scientists better define curiosity.

Track how Wikipedia searchers move between and among topics Wiki rabbit hole We uncovered three distinct styles of human curiosity: the “busier,” the “hunter,” and the “dancer.”

“Curiosity actually works by connecting information, not just acquiring it.” —Dani Bassett university of pennsylvania

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In this dictionary, a busy person zigzags through topics that are often distantly related. In contrast, hunters search with sustained concentration, moving between a relatively small number of closely related articles. Dancers try to synthesize new ideas by connecting very disparate topics. “Curiosity actually works by connecting information, not just acquiring information,” says Dani, a network scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who co-authored a recent study on these types of curiosity. Bassett said. in scientific progress. “We don’t travel around the world picking up information and putting it in our pockets like a stone. Instead, we collect information and combine it with what we already know. Masu.”

The researchers tracked more than 482,000 people using Wikipedia’s mobile app in 50 countries and territories and 14 languages. The researchers used a “knowledge network” of connected information to chart the paths of these users. This indicates how closely one search topic (node ​​in the network) is related to another search topic. Rather than simply mapping relationships, they linked curiosity styles to location-based indicators of well-being, inequality, and other measures.

In countries with higher levels of education and gender equality, people surf the web more aggressively. In countries that scored low on these variables, people browsed like hunters. Bassett hypothesizes that “in countries where there are more structures of oppression and patriarchal forces, there are constraints on knowledge production that may push people further into this hyper-focus.” . The researchers also analyzed the topics of interest of busy people compared to hunters, from physics to visual arts (graphic). Recently identified dancer patterns were excluded.

Eric Nook, a psychologist at Princeton University, praised the scope of the study as “surprisingly broad.” He said the authors brought together expertise from a variety of fields, including topology, psychology, cognitive science, affective science, clinical science, sociology, and computational modeling to uncover “many insights into human behavior.” It is said that he did it.

The seeds of this research were founded by Bassett and his twin brother, Perry Zahn, a philosophy professor at American University.While much academic research examines creativity, there is relatively little research into its essential precursor, curiosity. It was sown in 2016 when I realized that it was little studied. Zurun emerged from a deep dive into 2,000 years of Western historical and philosophical literature, with a variety of curious styles of writing, including three explored in a recent paper. Wikipedia then provided a real-world testbed to confirm this meddler-hunter-dancer typology drawn from the writings of great philosophers. Heidegger and Nietzsche could never have imagined that their work would one day influence network science down the Wiki rabbit hole.