Wikipedia’s Stock Rises
By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 1/1/2007
Wikipedia’s credibility got a boost after a recent survey found that the online encyclopedia created by users is accurate, according to experts.
The study, sponsored by the Nottingham University Business School in England, distributed Wikipedia articles to 30 academic subject specialists and 24 nonexpert volunteers. The experts rated their entries as more accurate than the nonspecialists did.
Thomas Chesney, who conducted the 2005 study published in the Web journal FirstMonday, noted that experts still found that 13 percent of the articles surveyed contained errors. Chesney, a Nottingham lecturer on database design and implementation, says, “Our students were starting to use Wikipedia in their assignments. We don’t count it as an academic source like a journal and a book. Still, even some faculty use it.”
Chesney’s survey is hardly the first to examine Wikipedia’s accuracy. In a controversial 2005 study, Nature magazine compared Wikipedia’s articles to those on Encyclopedia Britannica’s (EB) Web site and found 162 errors in the wiki entries compared to 123 errors on the same topic in EB.
Yet Chesney himself turns to the online site when he explores an unfamiliar subject and he’s even edited some Wikipedia entries including one on Microsoft. He believes it’s volunteer contributors who will help make the wiki more accurate. “Certainly the theory is that because of the number of people who edit it, the truth will eventually emerge,” says Chesney. “And so far, the response has been brilliant.”
