  Wikipedia, in its role as the world's largest encyclopedia, serves a broad
range of information needs. Although previous studies have noted that Wikipedia
users' information needs vary throughout the day, there is to date no
large-scale, quantitative study of the underlying dynamics. The present paper
fills this gap by investigating temporal regularities in daily consumption
patterns in a large-scale analysis of billions of timezone-corrected page
requests mined from English Wikipedia's server logs, with the goal of
investigating how context and time relate to the kind of information consumed.
First, we show that even after removing the global pattern of day-night
alternation, the consumption habits of individual articles maintain strong
diurnal regularities. Then, we characterize the prototypical shapes of
consumption patterns, finding a particularly strong distinction between
articles preferred during the evening/night and articles preferred during
working hours. Finally, we investigate topical and contextual correlates of
Wikipedia articles' access rhythms, finding that article topic, reader country,
and access device (mobile vs. desktop) are all important predictors of daily
attention patterns. These findings shed new light on how humans seek
information on the Web by focusing on Wikipedia as one of the largest open
platforms for knowledge and learning, emphasizing Wikipedia's role as a rich
knowledge base that fulfills information needs spread throughout the day, with
implications for understanding information seeking across the globe and for
designing appropriate information systems.
