  As one of the richest sources of encyclopedic information on the Web,
Wikipedia generates an enormous amount of traffic. In this paper, we study
large-scale article access data of the English Wikipedia in order to compare
articles with respect to the two main paradigms of information seeking, i.e.,
search by formulating a query, and navigation by following hyperlinks. To this
end, we propose and employ two main metrics, namely (i) searchshare -- the
relative amount of views an article received by search --, and (ii) resistance
-- the ability of an article to relay traffic to other Wikipedia articles -- to
characterize articles. We demonstrate how articles in distinct topical
categories differ substantially in terms of these properties. For example,
architecture-related articles are often accessed through search and are
simultaneously a "dead end" for traffic, whereas historical articles about
military events are mainly navigated. We further link traffic differences to
varying network, content, and editing activity features. Lastly, we measure the
impact of the article properties by modeling access behavior on articles with a
gradient boosting approach. The results of this paper constitute a step towards
understanding human information seeking behavior on the Web.
