A new salvo has been fired in the perennial war over Wikipedia's accuracy. Thomas Chesney, a Lecturer in Information Systems at the Nottingham University Business School, published the results of his own Wikipedia study in the most recent edition of the online journal First Monday, and he came up with a surprising conclusion: experts rate the articles more highly than do non-experts.
This less-than-intuitive finding is the conclusion of a study in which Chesney had 55 graduate students and research assistants examine one Wikipedia article apiece. Each participant was randomly placed into one of two groups: group one read articles that were in their field of study, while group two read randomly-assigned articles. Respondents were asked to identify any errors that they found.
Those in the expert group ranked their articles as generally credible, higher than those evaluated by the non-experts. Chesney admits that this is unexpected, but has a possible explanation: "It may be the case that non-experts are more cynical about information outside of their field and the difference comes from a natural reaction to rate unfamiliar articles as being less credible."
Whatever the reason for the results, they will cheer defenders of Wikipedia's accuracy, though Chesney urges caution in extrapolating too generally from his study. For one thing, the sample size was small. For another, 13 percent of those in the "experts" group reported finding mistakes in their assigned articles.
Whether this is better or worse than traditional, expert-based encyclopedias depends on who you ask. Nature did a highly-publicized comparative study between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica last year in which they found that the two were similar in terms of accuracy. Britannica disputed those findings and still claims to offer a more reliable product.
Chesney's study was not intended to settle the debate. He notes that, whatever Wikipedia's comparative accuracy, plenty of people (academics included) are using it, and he simply wanted to see whether Wikipedia could be considered accurate enough to be worth using. His study suggests that it can, but that caution—and further research—needs to be used before citing anything learned from Wikipedia as a fact.
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