Wikipedia big with experts?

By  | 11/28/2006 | Filed under: General

An interesting article appeared at Ars Technica yesterday:

A new salvo has been fired in the perennial war over Wikipedia‘s accuracy. Thomas Chesney, a Lecturer in Information Systems at the Nottingham University Business School, published the results of his own Wikipedia study in the most recent edition of the online journal First Monday, and he came up with a surprising conclusion: experts rate the articles more highly than do non-experts.

The study involved a small pool of 55 graduate students divided into two groups (experts and non-experts), bringing into question the generalizability and validity of the findings. This follows, however, last year’s finding that Wikipedia matches the Encyclopedia Britannica in accuracy.

The evidence is mounting. Wikipedia is pretty darn good.

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Dr. John Moravec is a faculty member in the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development and the Innovation Studies/Master of Liberal Studies graduate programs at the University of Minnesota. He is the principal of Education Futures LLC; a co-founder of the Horizon Forum, a roundtable on the future of education at all levels; and is the editor of Education Futures. He can be emailed at john@educationfutures.com.

http://www.educationfutures.com/john

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