The Perceived Credibility of Online Encyclopedias Among Children

This study examined young people’s trust of Wikipedia as an information resource. A large scale probability based survey with embedded quasi experiments was conducted with 2,747 children in the U.S. ranging from 11 to 18 years old. Results show that young people find Wikipedia to be fairly credible, but also exhibit an awareness of potential problems with non expert, user generated content in anonymous environments. Children tend to evaluate the credibility of online encyclopedia information with this in mind, at times with what appears to be an unwarranted de valuation of this information. User-generated Content and Information Credibility A critical feature of the contemporary Internet environment is the ability of users to be both information consumers and information providers. Indeed, the Internet’s very design facilitates widescale collaboration among individual users, which can take a number of forms, ranging from the provision of valuable information across a diversity of topics to the organization of political protests. One venue in which collectively-produced information has burgeoned in recent years is online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia, where anyone can anonymously contribute encyclopedia entries or edit those provided by others. Indeed, Wikipedia has risen in its short history to be among the top 10 most popular web sites in the U.S. today, with more than 3 million user-generated entries (Alexa 2009). Given that all of the content in Wikipedia is provided by anonymous individuals with unclear motives for contributing information, there has been a great deal of controversy and concern regarding the credibility of this information, particularly as compared to more established encyclopedias such as Encyclopedia Britannica, or online alternatives to Wikipedia such as Citizendium, which relies on information that is user-contributed but that is also vetted by experts prior to its publication. However, in spite of these concerns that user-generated content may be less credible than its expert -produced counterpart, early studies suggest that the differences may not be particularly great. For example, research has shown that user-created entries in Wikipedia have been judged to be nearly as accurate as well-regarded print encyclopedias like Encyclopedia Brittanica (Giles 2005), and entries from Wikipedia have been evaluated as relatively credible, and even moreso by area experts than by non-experts (Chesney 2006). Yet, a great deal is still unknown about the perceived credibility of online encyclopedias, particularly among specific and increasingly relevant user groups -most notably, among young people. Young people are particularly heavy users of Wikipedia for schoolwork and other pursuits, and will likely continue to be in the future (Rainie and Tancer 2007). Yet, children may not be very well equipped to determine the credibility of the information they find there. In anonymous, collectively-authored environments such as Wikipedia, information is missing as to what is perhaps the most important element for judging credibility – data about the origin or source of the information (Sundar 2008). This makes assessing the credibility of digital in formation generally, and Wikipedia in particular, extremely challenging, especially for young people. Perceived Information Credibility among Children Youth are a particularly intriguing group to consider with regard to online information credibility assessment because of the tension between their technical and social immersion with digital media, and their relatively limited development and lived experience compared to adults. On the one hand, those who have literally grown up in an environment saturated with networked digital information and social media technologies may be highly skilled in their use of these media to access, consume, and generate information. This suggests that in light of their special relationship to digital tools, youth are especially well-positioned to navigate the complex media environment successfully. On the other hand, many youth are limited in terms of their cognitive and emotional development, life experience, and familiarity with the media apparatus. This suggests that although youth may be talented and comfortable users of technology, they may lack critical tools and abilities that enable them to seek and evaluate information effectively. Children’s relative lack of life experience, for instance, may put them at greater risk than adults for falsely acceptCopyright © 2010, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. a 239 Proceedings of the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media