FROM ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA TO WIKIPEDIA

Abstract

This study examined the perceived credibility of user-generated (i.e. Wikipedia) versus more expertly provided online encyclopedic information (i.e. Citizendium, and the online version of the Encyclopædia Britannica) across generations. Two large-scale surveys with embedded quasi-experiments were conducted: among 11–18-year-olds living at home and among adults 18 years and older. Results showed that although use of Wikipedia is common, many people (particularly adults) do not truly comprehend how Wikipedia operates in terms of information provision, and that while people trust Wikipedia as an information source, they express doubt about the appropriateness of doing so. A companion quasi-experiment found that both children and adults assess information to be more credible when it originates or appears to originate from Encyclopædia Britannica. In addition, children rated information from Wikipedia to be less believable when they viewed it on Wikipedia's site than when that same information appeared on either Citizendium's site or on Encyclopædia Britannica's site. Indeed, content originating from Wikipedia was perceived by children as least credible when it was shown on a Wikipedia page, yet the most credible when it was shown on the page of Encyclopædia Britannica. The practical and theoretical implications of these results are discussed.

Keywords:

• information credibility
• social media
• user-generated content
• Wikipedia
• Web 2.0

Acknowledgement

The authors thank the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for their generous support of this work.

Notes

Tests showed that for children there were no differences on the dependent measure between the two encyclopedia entry topics. For adults, although findings varied slightly by entry topic, topic did not interact with the independent variables and did not appear to modify the overall study results in any clear way. In addition, the specific topic of the encyclopedia entry was not of theoretical interest in the current study and its inclusion as a factor seemed to needlessly complicate the findings. Therefore, the two topics were collapsed for analyses in both samples.

From its inception, credibility has been defined as the believability of a speaker, message, or the interaction between the speaker and his or her message (Hovland et al. 1953; Tseng & Fogg 1999). Results of the pilot tests during the instrument development stage of the research showed that, particularly among the child respondents, believability was a clearer term than credibility. Thus, credibility was operationalized in terms of believability for both children and adults to ensure comparable data.