Tree Traversal of Wikipedia

I often hear computer-sciencey nerds taking informal polls to see if more of their friends browse Wikipedia using breadth-first or depth-first traversal strategies. You should all be aware by now of how these trees are generated (below, xkcd #214).

Anyways, the difference between those two is simply whether new tabs are opened next to the current tab, or on the far right.

Much more interesting, to me, is the difference between depth-first (also called preorder) and postorder traversal, which boils down to whether or not the root (the article you are currently reading) is visited (completely read) before its children (the links you open as you read). Proponents of depth-first ridicule the postorderers’ skittish attention, while the latter retort back that they prefer to actually understand what they’re reading.

Now, since I use the amazing navigation popups, I can get an idea of what something is without having to leave the article I’m reading. gg.