Behavioral Aspects in the Interaction Between Wikipedia and its Users

Wikipedia continues to be the most well-known on-line encyclopedia and receives the visits of millions of users on a daily basis. Its contents correspond to almost all the knowledge areas and are altruistically contributed by individuals and organizations. In addition, users are encouraged to add their own contributions according to the Wikipedia's own supporting paradigm. Its progression to a mass phenomenon has propitiated many studies and research initiatives. Therefore, topics such as the quality of the published contents or the authoring of its contributions have been widely developed. However, very few attention has been paid to the behavioral aspects characterizing the interaction between Wikipedia and its users. Henceforth, this chapter aims to determine the habits exhibited by users when browsing the Wikipedia pages. Particularly, we will focus on visits and contributions, as they constitute the two most common forms of interaction. Our study is based on a sample of the requests submitted to Wikipedia, and its results are twofold: on the one hand, it provides different metrics concerning users' behavior and, on the other, presents particular comparisons among different Wikipedia editions.