Perceptions of Wikipedia's Credibility

Milwaukee.
The next presenter at AoIR 2009 is Ericka Menchen-Trevino, whose interest is in the assessment of the credibility of online information, here especially for Wikipedia content, of course. Wikipedia is now a major source of information, and is used by many users especially also for health information, which is particularly problematic if users do not exercise sufficient caution in using the information provided here.

Ericka examined this by surveying the attitudes of college students towards Wikipedia's credibility; they were asked about specific information-seeking skills, and their actions in information seeking tests were also examined using screen capture and audio/video recording (using hypothetical scenarios).

77% of students accessed wikipedia at least one time during their task session - of these, 81% directly searched for a term on Wikipedia, while 53% went directly to Wikipedia to search. 47% accessed Wikipedia content as the result of searches elsewhere (hope I have this right). Interviews showed that some users had a limited knowledge of how Wikipedia is edited (some assumed the presence of paid editors!), and many noted that their teachers disliked their direct citation of Wikipedia entries (but they still used it for their own purposes).

Some students did exhibit an awareness that some articles in Wikipedia may be on disputed topics and therefore less credible than others, but this was on the high end of understanding; some 27% engaged in further verification of Wikipedia content through other sources, and the level of their verification is related to the themes they are searching for. Nobody mentioned the NPOV or verification policies, so understanding of these may be very limited; discussion, user, and article history pages were also not mentioned.

So, there remain some users who still don't know that anyone can edit Wikipedia; while many know that it is and that they should verify its content elsewhere, few do; and there is little knowledge of when Wikipedia content may be accurate or inaccurate (and ignore tags on the site which points this out), and none seemed to know how to look under the hood to help assess accuracy. Obviously, this focusses only on a limited group of users (college students in the US), though, as Ericka notes, so more research is needed here.

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