Searching Wikipedia: learning the why, the how, and the role played by emotion

Searching Wikipedia has been the focus of study for an increasing number of information retrieval publications. In recent years different IR tasks have used Wikipedia as a basis for evaluating algorithms and interfaces for various types of search tasks, including Question Answering, Exploratory Search, Entity Search and Structured Document retrieval. Despite being associated with these well-defined task types, little is known about why people actually search wikipedia, what they try to find, how and why they try to find it or the criteria they use to define success. We argue that the way wikipedia content is generated influences the way it is used, including search behaviour. We are particularly interested in learning about affective aspects of search, which have been suggested to be an important motivating factor in wikipedia search behaviour, particularly in leisure scenarios. In this position paper we motivate the investigation of wikipedia search behaviour in the wild and present our ideas on the best way to study this behaviour.