Title: Inspiration, Captivation, and Misdirection: Emergent Properties in Networks of Online Navigation,
Abstract: The World Wide Web (WWW) has fundamentally changed the ways billions of
people are able to access information. Thus, understanding how people seek
information online is an important issue of study. Wikipedia is a hugely
important part of information provision on the web, with hundreds of millions
of users browsing and contributing to its network of knowledge. The study of
navigational behaviour on Wikipedia, due to the site's popularity and breadth
of content, can reveal more general information seeking patterns that may be
applied beyond Wikipedia and the Web. Our work addresses the relative
shortcomings of existing literature in relating how information structure
influences patterns of navigation online. We study aggregated clickstream data
for articles on the English Wikipedia in the form of a weighted, directed
navigational network. We introduce two parameters that describe how articles
act to source and spread traffic through the network, based on their in/out
strength and entropy. From these, we construct a navigational phase space where
different article types occupy different, distinct regions, indicating how the
structure of information online has differential effects on patterns of
navigation. Finally, we go on to suggest applications for this analysis in
identifying and correcting deficiencies in the Wikipedia page network that may
also be adapted to more general information networks.