Wikipedia, in its role as the world's largest encyclopedia, serves a broad range of information needs. Although previous studies have noted that Wikipedia users' information needs vary throughout the day, there is to date no large-scale, quantitative study of the underlying dynamics. The present paper fills this gap by investigating temporal regularities in daily consumption patterns in a large-scale analysis of billions of timezone-corrected page requests mined from English Wikipedia's server logs, with the goal of investigating how context and time relate to the kind of information consumed. First, we show that even after removing the global pattern of day-night alternation, the consumption habits of individual articles maintain strong diurnal regularities. Then, we characterize the prototypical shapes of consumption patterns, finding a particularly strong distinction between articles preferred during the evening/night and articles preferred during working hours. Finally, we investigate topical and contextual correlates of Wikipedia articles' access rhythms, finding that article topic, reader country, and access device (mobile vs. desktop) are all important predictors of daily attention patterns. These findings shed new light on how humans seek information on the Web by focusing on Wikipedia as one of the largest open platforms for knowledge and learning, emphasizing Wikipedia's role as a rich knowledge base that fulfills information needs spread throughout the day, with implications for understanding information seeking across the globe and for designing appropriate information systems.

翻译：维基百科作为全球最大的百科全书，服务于广泛的信息需求。尽管此前研究已注意到维基百科用户的信息需求在一天中有所变化，但至今缺乏对其潜在动态的大规模定量研究。本文通过分析从英文维基百科服务器日志中提取的数十亿条经时区校正的页面请求，对日常消费模式中的时间规律进行大规模研究，旨在探究情境和时间如何影响所消费信息的类型，从而填补这一空白。首先，我们表明即使去除昼夜交替的全球模式，单篇文章的消费习惯仍保持强烈的昼夜规律性。随后，我们刻画了消费模式的典型形态，发现晚间/夜间偏好的文章与工作时间偏好的文章之间存在显著区别。最后，我们研究了维基百科文章访问节奏的主题和情境相关性，发现文章主题、读者所在国家和访问设备（移动端与桌面端）均是日常注意力模式的重要预测因素。这些发现通过聚焦于维基百科这一最大的开放知识与学习平台之一，揭示了人类如何在网络上寻求信息的新视角，强调了维基百科作为满足全天候信息需求的丰富知识库的作用，并对理解全球信息寻求行为以及设计合适的信息系统具有启示意义。