University Student Use of the Wikipedia

The 2008 proxy log covering all student access to the Wikipedia from the University of Otago is analysed. The log covers 17,635 student users for all 366 days in the year, amounting to over 577,973 user sessions. The analysis shows the Wikipedia is used every hour of the day, but seasonally. Use is low between semesters, rising steadily throughout the semester until it peaks at around exam time. The analysis of the articles that are retrieved as well as an analysis of which links are clicked shows that the Wikipedia is used for study-related purposes. Medical documents are popular reflecting the specialty of the university. The mean Wikipedia session length is about a minute and a half and consists of about three clicks. The click graph the users generated is compared to the link graph in the Wikipedia. In about 14% of the user sessions the user has chosen a sub-optimal path from the start of their session to the final document they view. In 33% the path is better than optimal suggesting that users prefer to search than to follow the link-graph. When they do click, they click links in the running text (93.6%) and rarely on “See Also” links (6.4%), but this bias disappears when the frequency of these types of links’ occurrence is corrected for. Several recommendations for changes to the link discovery methodology are made. These changes include using highly viewed articles from the log as test data and using user clicks as user judgements.