Mining halal food search pathways down the Wikipedia’s rabbit hole

Abstract

ABSTRACT Wikipedia has grown to be the biggest online encyclopedia in terms of comprehensiveness, reach, and coverage. However, although different websites and social network platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit have received considerable academic attention, Wikipedia has largely gone unnoticed. This is surprising given the fact that Wikipedia is the fifth most-widely visited website. In this study, we fill this research gap by investigating halal food navigation strategies over an entire month. We use the recently released clickstream data which contains more than 25 million pairs of URLs in English language, accounting for a total of around 6-billion-page requests to the Wikipedia servers. Compared to outgoing traffic analysis, search patterns of the incoming traffic to the halal food entry reveal that readers are more prone to fall into the Wikipedia rabbit hole. Using techniques borrowed from social network analysis (SNA), our results also show that the information network of the Wikipedia halal food topics follows a small world preferential attachment pattern. This finding lends strong support to the “Matthew Effect”, which is a variation of the “rich get richer” model. Our findings hold important implications for different stakeholders as they underscore the relational nature of halal food networks and the importance of online encyclopedias as critical information tools.