FYI

 

Rick Uttich

http://employees.oneonta.edu/uttichrm/

 

 

 

  <http://chronicle.com/> 

 

 

 

  <http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/> 

 

 


November 27, 2006


Wikipedia Passes Another Test
<http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/1734/wikipedia-passes-another-
test> 


Several scholars have taken stabs at assessing the credibility of
Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia that seems to harbor more errors
in theory than it does in practice (The Chronicle,
<http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i10/10a03101.htm>  October 27). And
most of those experts -- including, most famously, the editors of Nature
-- have come back with at least guarded praise of the site.

Add Thomas Chesney to the list of relatively satisfied scholars.

Mr. Chesney, a lecturer in information systems at the University of
Nottingham, in England, recently completed a study in which he sent
Wikipedia articles to more than 50 professors. Half of those professors
were asked to review articles within their areas of expertise, while the
other half were assigned non sequitur entries chosen by the
encyclopedia's own random-article generator. Both groups of scholars
then completed a survey describing their views on the articles and on
Wikipedia as a whole.

"The experts" -- that is, the professors who read articles about their
chief subjects of study -- "found Wikipedia's articles to be more
credible than the nonexperts," writes Mr. Chesney in First Monday.
<http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_11/chesney/>  "This suggests that
the accuracy of Wikipedia is high."

The study should not be taken as proof that Wikipedia is trustworthy
across the board, though. As Mr. Chesney admits, his sample size was
small. And experts did say they found mistakes in 13 percent of the
articles they reviewed. --Brock Read

Posted on Monday