Wikipedia searches reveal differing styles of curiosity
15 comments
·January 10, 2025randcraw
For more background (2022):
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/sep/04/busybody-hun...
"The busybody makes it their business to know everything and anything – they want to know as much as possible, and like a butterfly flit about from topic to topic. The hunter, conversely, has a focused curiosity, and they tirelessly track down new discoveries like a hound. The dancer leaps creatively through knowledge, relying on their imagination."
m463
I wonder how the word "busybody" was chosen?
A busybody implies someone who is nosey, the type of person that peeks through their curtains at what the neighbors are doing.
The article says:
"In this lexicon, a busybody traces a zigzagging route through many often distantly related topics."
I wonder what is accurate?
prolyxis
It seems like it stems from a 2019 philosophy article written by Perry Zurn, titled "Busybody, Hunter, Dancer: Three Historical Modes of Curiosity."
Zurn does write "At their most basic level, a busybody is someone who is curious about other people's business," but develops the concept a bit further. Zurn says "The busybody's ideational sphere, for example, is characterized by quick associations, discrete pieces of information, and loose knowledge webs. They are interested in conceptual rarities: whatever lies outside of their knowledge grids."
Whereas the research article Zhou et al. (2024) states "Hunters build tight, constrained networks whereas busybodies build loose, broad networks." So it seems their conception of busybody roughly matches Zurn's description.
See the methods section https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn3268#sec-4 , for a description of how Zhou et al. (2014) aggregate graph theoretic metrics to define "busybody" and "hunter" styles of navigating Wikipedia.
leobg
I also find the conclusions odd. Could it be that for the rich people, Wikipedia is just entertainment, whereas people in poorer countries actually seek to understand a topic in order to solve a problem?
fargle
i'm a rabbit-holer. follow the chain of interesting links from one article to the next over and over to see where i get to with hardly any backtracking. after about 5-6 links it's pretty random. after about 20 who knows where you'll end up.
dambi0
Busybody seems an unfortunate name to me, I don’t think it’s a particularly positive label.
I think there’s also a category difference betweeen hunter / busybody and dancer. The first suggest search strategies the second the utility of thst search. How do we know that hunters and busybodies aren’t just failed dancers?
DigitalNoumena
There seems to be a deliberate, implicit value judgement about "busybodies" that would explain the negative connotations:
> Bassett hypothesizes that “in countries that have more structures of oppression or patriarchal forces, there may be a constraining of knowledge production that pushes people more toward this hyperfocus.”
jorams
The article describes the "hunters" as more focused, so I am fairly certain that statement refers to the "hunters" instead of the "busybodies".
dobladov
You might like https://blinpete.github.io/wiki-graph, personally I like to search cooking terms and find other related cuisine
simojo
> "a busybody traces a zigzagging route through many often distantly related topics. A hunter, in contrast, searches with sustained focus, moving among a relatively small number of closely related articles. A dancer links together highly disparate topics to try to synthesize new ideas."
Depending on my end goal, I'll do a combination of all three.
tolerance
> In countries with higher education levels and greater gender equality, people browsed more like busybodies. In countries with lower scores on these variables, people browsed like hunters. Bassett hypothesizes that “in countries that have more structures of oppression or patriarchal forces, there may be a constraining of knowledge production that pushes people more toward this hyperfocus.”
This is an odd hypothesis and you know, I’ve read a little bit of enough about postmodernism/critical theory and its influence on hypertext to feel like this take is down right saditty.
The need to try to sow conflict between “patriarchy” and “xetriarchy” by depicting one style of curiosity as more virtuous than the other dampens what looks like an otherwise interesting study.
And it doesn’t help that the authors don’t appear to list or accessibly depict which countries were more inclined toward one style as opposed to the other.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn3268
If anyone can decipher the sophistry in the actual study, please let me know what’s going on here, especially in figure 8.
orwin
> The need to try to sow conflict between “patriarchy” and “xetriarchy” by depicting one style of curiosity as more virtuous than the other
Did you understood that one method was better than the other? To me it's just different way of using Wikipedia. I'm more of a busybody myself, but I can do hyperfocused dive ('hunter', which to me seems more positive) on specific subjects when needed. I often go out of Wikipedia in that case though (I use it to find links mostly)
nitwit005
I'm not sure I can believe such a study unless there is a "drunk browsing behavior" category.
Slava_Propanei
[dead]
Somewhat related: Isaiah Berlin's "The Hedgehog and the Fox". From wiki:
> hedgehogs ... view the world through the lens of a single defining idea, and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox