Visual Positions of Links and Clicks on Wikipedia.

In this work, we study the visual position of links and their clicks on Wikipedia, particularly where links are visually located, at which screen positions users click on links, and which areas on the screen exhibit more or less clicks per links. For that purpose, we introduce a novel dataset containing the on-screen coordinate position for all links between pages in the English Wikipedia and additionally resort to navigation logs of Wikipedia users. Using this data, we can observe a preference of certain link and click locations on Wikipedia including first evidence of positional click bias. For example, our results suggest that users have a tendency to prefer to click on the left side of the screen which exceeds what one would expect from the presence of links on pages. We believe that presented data and research can be useful for optimizing the process of link creation and link consumption on Wikipedia and other Web platforms.