Visual Positions of Links and Clicks on Wikipedia

Visual Positions of Links and Clicks on Wikipedia - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2016, written by Dimitar Dimitrov, Philipp Singer, Florian Lemmerich and Markus Strohmaier.

Overview

In this work, authors study the visual position of links and their clicks on Wikipedia, particularly where links are visually located, at which screen positions users click on links, and which areas on the screen exhibit more or less clicks per links. For that purpose, authors introduce a novel dataset containing the on-screen coordinate position for all links between pages in the English Wikipedia and additionally resort to navigation logs of Wikipedia users. Using this data, authors can observe a preference of certain link and click locations on Wikipedia including first evidence of positional click bias. For example, results suggest that users have a tendency to prefer to click on the left side of the screen which exceeds what one would expect from the presence of links on pages. Authors believe that presented data and research can be useful for optimizing the process of link creation and link consumption on Wikipedia and other Web platforms.