The Role of Infoboxes in Health Information Access on Wikipedia: An Eye-Tracking Study

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the role of Wikipedia's infobox in supporting user comprehension and satisfaction during health information seeking. While infoboxes are widely used across Wikipedia to provide summaries of key article content, research on their actual effectiveness remains limited. The main objectives of this study were to analyze whether the presence of an infobox influences navigation time in goal oriented searching, knowledge acquisition, perceived article usefulness, and task satisfaction, and whether specific structural elements of the infobox impact these outcomes. To address these objectives, an eye-tracking study was conducted with 24 participants tasked with navigating four distinct health-related Wikipedia articles, presented either with or without an infobox, in order to determine the concrete effects if its presence. Participants completed knowledge assessment questionnaires before and after each task, and provided ratings of article helpfulness and task satisfaction. Statistical analysis revealed that in cases where the infobox was present, task completion time was significantly reduced and both user satisfaction and article helpfulness ratings were consistently higher. However, no significant impact was observed in knowledge retention, suggesting that infoboxes support quick reference rather than deep learning. Regarding the impact of the level of attention in trials with an infobox, no statistically significant patterns were identified. Additional correlation analysis within the infobox condition showed no consistent relationship between engagement with individual infobox components and performance or satisfaction metrics, except for a negative correlation between fixations on the infobox image and article helpfulness ratings. These findings contribute to the understanding of information structure in web-based environments and highlight the importance of infoboxes in enhancing user experience, while also identifying limitations in their impact on learning outcomes.