How Wikipedia Could Improve Your Internet Surfing

For years, critics have feared that the Internet will kill interestingness, offering us only what we’re looking for with none of the happy accidents that can spur creative thought. Might a solution to this problem come from the kind of browsing we do on Wikipedia?

In a Fast Company review of Wikipedia’s new iOS app, Chris Gayomali sets the scene:

“One minute you’re on Wikipedia, reading up on the ‘Simpsons’ episode that Michael Jackson secretly guest-starred on; three hours whiz by, and suddenly your whole night is lost and you’re staring at an alphabetized list of French Impressionist painters, to say nothing of the 23 other tabs you haven’t even clicked on.

“Wikipedia’s strange ability to warp time and space to send you down a rabbit hole has been a central part of its long-term success.”

The app, he posits, might enhance that ability even further. “Totally rewritten,” his review’s subheading reads, “the speedier new Wikipedia app makes it easy to get lost — in a good way.” One of the changes is a new sidebar that allows users to jump easily to different sections of a single article. Vibha Bamba, an interaction designer at Wikipedia, tells Mr. Gayomali: “We understand that readers love reading on Wikipedia, but they don’t often get past the first section. They read two sentences, and then they hit a link.” She adds: “We want you to jump around the article to find different entry points. We wanted to support curiosity in a design sort of way.”

Whether the new app actually results in longer Wikipedia rabbit holes remains to be seen. And Wikipedia is hardly the first site to want users to spend more time with its content. Still, Mr. Gayomali’s emphasis on Wikipedia’s ability to promote lostness is interesting, since getting lost — and happening upon things we didn’t think we’d find — is an experience critics fear the Internet has stolen from us.

Damon Darlin made a relatively early version of this argument in The New York Times in 2009 — “the digital age,” he wrote, “is stamping out serendipity.” He argued that the structure of services like Facebook, Twitter and iTunes made it hard for us to come upon something unexpected:

“Everything we need to know comes filtered and vetted. We are discovering what everyone else is learning, and usually from people we have selected because they share our tastes. It won’t deliver that magic moment of discovery that we imagine occurred when Elvis Presley first heard the blues, or when Michael Jackson followed Fred Astaire’s white spats across the dance floor.”

Astra Taylor, in her recent book “The People’s Platform,” critiques what she sees as the “winner-take-all” nature of online media, in which a few sites or stories get the lion’s share of the attention: “When we click on the top search results or watch the FrontPage videos on YouTube or read established blogs, we are jumping on invisible bandwagons.” She explains:

“Most-read lists and top search results create a feedback loop perpetuating the success of the already successful. When an article becomes ‘most e-mailed,’ it garners more attention and thus its reign is extended. The more a viral meme spreads, the more likely you are to catch it. As a consequence, the same silly gags land in all our in-boxes, a small number of Web sites get read by everyone, and a handful of super-celebrities overshadow the millions who languish in obscurity.”

Others have written about a coming wave of Internet sameness, driven in part by the rise of social traffic (especially from Facebook). At The Daily Dot, Matt Saccaro argues that publishers’ reliance on social media makes it “beneficial to design nearly every post for the Bored Office Worker demographic — the kind of people who delight in sharing quiz results about what kind of bottle cap they are, love cliched image macros, worship lists, and only share news if it’s about the San Francisco Bat Kid or an elevator fight between Jay-Z and Solange.” The result: “The Internet media world is a maelstrom of homogeneity.”

Mr. Saccaro also cites Derek Thompson at The Atlantic, who’s a bit more measured on the topic. Mr. Thompson writes:

“We should expect — and have already seen — an expedited clustering effect around news tropes, and this clustering is making news organizations more like each other. This goes back to technology. The better publishers can see what audiences are reading, the more they will be inclined to quickly serve up duplicates of the most popular stuff.”

Mr. Thompson adds, “We’re reading a real-time stream of audience reaction, and when we see what you like, we’re giving it to you again and again.”

Some have offered potential fixes to reinsert the unexpected into our online lives. Mr. Darlin mentions a random restaurant recommendation feature in an app built by the food-review site UrbanSpoon. And Ms. Taylor cites Eli Pariser, the founder of Upworthy and a longtime critic of the Internet’s tendency to give us what we already know we like:

“In theory, Pariser argues, algorithms could be fairer than fallible humans, introducing us to wider range of material than we may otherwise seek out, expanding our exposure to diversity by being less conscious of race, gender, and class or things like political orientation. But that can happen only if those values are written into the system, a sense of civic responsibility folded purposely into the code. Failing that, the algorithms being created are likely to reflect the dominant social norms of our day and, perhaps, be even more discriminatory than the people who devised them.”

Whether motivated by civic responsibility or not, Wikipedia offers some of the serendipity Mr. Darlin calls for. For example, its “random article” feature is placed somewhat more prominently in the app than on the website. And then there’s the kind of serendipity Mr. Gayomali mentions, the experience of traveling from the information you were actually seeking to matters farther and farther afield, until it’s midnight and you’re learning about Monet (although this kind of browsing may proceed from the highbrow to the low more often than the other way around).

Spending hours on Wikipedia is generally thought of as a time-wasting habit, but if critics of Internet sameness are right, maybe it’ll help you broaden your mind, or even find the inspiration to create a masterpiece. Next time someone catches you reading about yetis for hours, you can say you’re just doing your part for humanity.