Milgram’s experiment in the knowledge space: Individual navigation strategies

Abstract

Data deluge characteristic for our times has led to information overload, posing a significant challenge to effectively finding our way through the digital landscape. Addressing this issue requires an in-depth understanding of how we navigate through the abundance of information. Previous research has discovered multiple patterns in how individuals navigate in the geographic, social, and information spaces, yet individual differences in strategies for navigation in the knowledge space has remained largely unexplored. To bridge the gap, we conducted an online experiment where participants played a navigation game on Wikipedia and completed questionnaires about their personal information. Utilizing a graph embedding trained on the English Wikipedia, our study identified distinctive strategies that participants adopt: when the target is a famous person, participants typically use the geographical and occupational information of the target to navigate, reminiscent of hub-driven and proximity-driven approaches, respectively. We discovered that many participants playing the same game exhibit a ”wisdom of the crowd” effect: The set of strategies provide a good estimate for the information landscape around the target indicating that the individual differences complement each other.