The current issue of First Monday (Nov 2006) features an empirical study about Wikipedia‘s credibility. What’s really interesting about the study’s findings isn’t the ratio of Wikipedia articles that contain errors (13 per cent including typos), but the perceived credibility. According to researched Thomas Chesney, experts found Wikipedia articles in their field more credible than non-experts did:
“There is a difference between the mean responses when assessing the article’s credibility (…). The oddity is the direction of this difference — the experts rated the articles as being more credible than the non–experts. This suggests that the accuracy of Wikipedia’s information is high.”
(Chesney didn’t find a correlation between “respondent’s cynicism and perceived credibility”. Cool.)
