Most research on consumption (readership) dynamics focuses on (Okoli et al., 2014, p. 2393):

1. Ranking and popularity of Wikipedia

2. Wikipedia as a knowledge source for news, health information, and for scholars and librarians

3. Student readership

4. Perceptions of credibility

Sample Studies:

1. An analysis of the scientific accuracy of pages on controversial topics like climate change (Wilson & Likens, 2015) .

2. A study which examined surges in page view count data for particular pages correlating those surges with celebrity awareness campaigns of particular neurological diseases (Brigo et al., 2015).

Sample Studies:

1. One study aiming to understand how much French students of different ages (11 - post-secondary) trust Wikipedia as an information source deployed a questionnaire using a combination of structured and un-structured questions (Borås & Vol, 2018).

2. Another study designed a widget that would pop up when people accessed Wikipedia pages and would ask them to fill out an online survey with questions to interrogate why they were accessing that page (Lemmerich et al., 2019).

Sample Studies:

1. Many studies will compare rank and popularity of different websites using traffic tools and webpage ranking software (Okoli et al., 2014, p. 2395).

2. One study developed software to infer how the proprietary (private) algorithms of different search engines work to create different referral paths to Wikipedia (Höchstötter & Lewandowski, 2009) .

Sample Studies:

1. One study designed a chrome extension that manipulated search returns on Google, restricting how accessible Wikipedia articles are in search results, showing just how much people depend on Google searches to access Wikipedia content (Mcmahon et al., 2017).

2. Another looked at the effect that the presence or absence of authors, references, sponsors, awards, or the affiliated encyclopedia had on the participants' perception of information credibility (Kubiszewski et al., 2011).

Sample Studies:

1. A Chrome extension was created for one study which logged participant clicks and usage as they navigated from Google search results to Wikipedia finding that Wikipedia traffic is extremely vulnerable to Google search results (Mcmahon et al., 2017).

Sample Studies:

1. Though the results are likely outdated, one study used semi-structured interviews to discover that, with a very small sample (n=15), young people use Wikipedia for an extremely limited and largely inconsequential amount of tasks (Luyt et al., 2008).

Sample Studies:

1. One study aimed to better understand how people navigate, read, and make sense of Wikipedia by tracking participants' eye movements as they read certain articles (Kessler et al., 2020).

Details:

While it would be most helpful to do a referral path and click path analysis, access to the necessary data is difficult (Gyllstrom & Moens, 2012). Though Wikipedia makes much user data freely and openly available, path data is not one of them, however, page view data is.

Example article:

Analyze the Chicxulub Crater article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater

Details:

• Conduct a broader platform-level inquiry, which will not focus on just one single article

• Group participants into general standard demographics,

  • Seek to quantify their stated interest in science

• Attempt to understand behavior

  • By asking which scientific Wikipedia articles they might have accessed,

  • Why they did so,

  • What situations they believe would lead them to accessing scientific content on Wikipedia in the future

  • Other questions interrogating behaviour and motives.