Experts Rate Wikipedia Higher Than Non-Experts

Grooves writes "A new Wikipedia study suggests that when experts and non-experts look to assess Wikipedia for accuracy, the non-experts are harder on the free encyclopedia than the experts. The researcher had 55 graduate students and research assistants examine one Wikipedia article apiece for accuracy, some in fields they were familiar with and some not. Those in the expert group ranked their articles as generally credible, higher than those evaluated by the non-experts. One researcher said '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.'" That's the problem people face when 'everyone who disagrees with you is a moron'.

Comments

Re:it's a question of open-mindness

[heroofhyr]

I believe that the difference between the groups that this study used was not really the fact that in one group there were "experts" and in the other "non-experts", but that in one group there were "grad-students" and in the other "non-grad-students".

And I believe someone should RTFA before weighing in on it. It wasn't divided into "people who are grad students" and "people who aren't grad students," it was divided into "people who are grad students or researchers in a certain field and are given an article from Wikipedia about that field" and "people who are grad students or researchers in a certain field and are given a random article from Wikipedia's 'Random Article' link in the Navigation Menu on the front page." Or maybe we shall let the study itself explain:

A total of 258 academics (research fellows, research assistants and PhD students) were asked to participate in the study. 69 (27 percent) agreed to take part with 55 (21 percent) actually completing the survey. Each respondent was randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions. Under Condition 1 they were asked to read an article in Wikipedia that was related to their area of expertise. For example, a member of the Fungal Biology and Genetics Research Group (in the Institute of Genetics at Nottingham University; see http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/biology/Genetics/index .phtml) was asked to look at the article on metabolites. Areas of expertise were found from the academics' own Web sites with the choice of article being made by the author. If there was any doubt the expert was contacted for advice. Under Condition 2 respondents were asked to read a random article. Wikipedia's own random article selection feature was used to assign a different article to each Condition 2 respondent. (http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_11/chesney/ )

It's very short, so it's not too big of an inconvenience to actually read it.

Re:Peer reviewed

[OctaviusIII]

Problems still arise with bias, but generally they arise in some of the less travelled articles where individuals can cut what they don't like. For example, the article on the Laurentian Leadership Centre, where I happen to be right now, was expanded upon by one of the students. Another editor simply didn't like the host school and cut it back considerably (although it looks like the proper edits are back), censoring what he didn't like and creating a bias. It's like the plagiarism thing a while back - quality decreases when traffic decreases, but that's the nature of a Wiki project, I suppose.