[Web4lib] An empirical examination of Wikipedia’s credibility (FirstMonday article)

[B.G. Sloan]

  Chesney, Thomas. An empirical examination of Wikipedia’s credibility. First Monday, volume 11, number 11 (November 2006)
   
  http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_11/chesney/index.html 
   
  From the abstract:
   
  “This short study examines Wikipedia’s credibility by asking 258 research staff with a response rate of 21 percent, to read an article and assess its credibility, the credibility of its author and the credibility of Wikipedia as a whole. Staff were either given an article in their own expert domain or a random article. No difference was found between the two group in terms of their perceived credibility of Wikipedia or of the articles’ authors, but a difference was found in the credibility of the articles — the experts found Wikipedia’s articles to be more credible than the non–experts. This suggests that the accuracy of Wikipedia is high. However, the results should not be seen as support for Wikipedia as a totally reliable resource as, according to the experts, 13 percent of the articles contain mistakes.”
   
  Bernie Sloan
   

 
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