[WikiEN-l] Need help compiling Wikipedia accuracy studies

Mon Sep 19 07:12:34 UTC 2005

I have a request. My university's education department offers a graduate 
course in Technology utilization, and (believe it or not) wikis [in 
general] and Wikipedia [in particular] are part of the curriculum. I've 
been asked to come in as a guest speaker. The topic will be "Why should 
I believe anything on the Web and (especially) on Wikipedia"

So, to this end, I was looking for studies of Wikipedia and/or 
comparisons with other mainstream sources. Here's what I have so far. 
Any suggestions to add to this list would be most appreciated.

1)
A group of students in the Graduate School of Library and Information 
Science at the University of Illinois has published a paper entitled 
"Information Quality Discussions in Wikipedia" (PDF format). The focus 
of the paper was on assessing the IQ of Wikipedia featured articles — in 
this case, IQ stands for "information quality" — when compared to other 
samples from the project, including featured article removal candidates, 
pages marked as NPOV disputes, and a selection of random pages. 
According to the paper, the study showed how seriously the Wikipedia 
project views issues of article quality. The authors concluded that as a 
quality standard, the featured article process "is not ideal, but it 
does seem relatively rigorous." They also noted that the process is not 
as resource-intensive as other possibilities, such as blind judging. - 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-08-01/Featured_content
PDF of research paper can be found at: 
http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~stvilia/papers/qualWiki.pdf

2) An article comparing the WP to Brockhaus and Encarta has appeared in 
issue 21/04 of C't, a major German computer engineering magazine. It is 
titled /Lexika: Wikipedia gegen Brockhaus und Encarta/, starting on p. 
132 - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_vs_Brockhaus_and_Encarta
Full survey results can be found at: 
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2004-October/035339.html

3) Computer Science professor (and minor geek rockstar) Ed Felton 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Felten) posted in his blog about a 
small-scale survey he did of Wikipedia: 
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=674

-Mark