Abstract
Wikipedia is the largest source of free encyclopedic knowledge and one of the most visited sites on the Web. To increase reader understanding of the article, Wikipedia editors add images within the text of the article’s body. However, despite their widespread usage on web platforms and the huge volume of visual content on Wikipedia, little is known about the importance of images in the context of free knowledge environments. To bridge this gap, we collect data about English Wikipedia reader interactions with images during one month and perform the first large-scale analysis of how interactions with images happen on Wikipedia. First, we quantify the overall engagement with images, finding that one in 29 pageviews results in a click on at least one image, one order of magnitude higher than interactions with other types of article content. Second, we study what factors associate with image engagement and observe that clicks on images occur more often in shorter articles and articles about visual arts or transports and biographies of less well-known people. Third, we look at interactions with Wikipedia article previews and find that images help support reader information need when navigating through the site, especially for more popular pages. The findings in this study deepen our understanding of the role of images for free knowledge and provide a guide for Wikipedia editors and web user communities to enrich the world’s largest source of encyclopedic knowledge.
Highlights
Almost 20 years after its birth, Wikipedia has become the reference for online diffusion of free encyclopedic knowledge, reaching 54M articles in 313 language editions.1 Its content is generated by the collaborative effort of a large community of editors, and provides a reliable source of information for web users [1]
Navarrete et al [30] investigated the role of image paintings on Wikipedia, finding that they are extensively used to illustrate non-art-related topic and that their audience is even larger than that of art-related articles. While most of these works focus on the image content or the Wikipedia editor communities, we study here the complementary aspect of how readers interact with the visual content
5.1 Overall engagement with images: the global click-through rate We find that the gCTR across all pages in English Wikipedia with at least one image is 3.5%, meaning that around 3.5 out of 100 times readers visit a page, they click on an image
Summary
Almost 20 years after its birth, Wikipedia has become the reference for online diffusion of free encyclopedic knowledge, reaching 54M articles in 313 language editions. Its content is generated by the collaborative effort of a large community of editors, and provides a reliable source of information for web users [1]. Almost 20 years after its birth, Wikipedia has become the reference for online diffusion of free encyclopedic knowledge, reaching 54M articles in 313 language editions.. Its content is generated by the collaborative effort of a large community of editors, and provides a reliable source of information for web users [1]. Knowledge on Wikipedia is mainly conveyed under the form of written text, and through other types of content, such as references and images. The space of visual content on Wikipedia is vast. The genesis of Wikipedia images involves the contribution of Wikipedia editors, and the participation of visual content creators. Visual content on Commons and Wikipedia originates from individual photographers, artists, web users and cultural institutions in the GLAM spaces, who actively release their works of art for free and public use
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