Overview
Once regarded with skepticism, Wikipedia has evolved from a questionable source to a massive repository of knowledge on diverse subjects. The credibility of information found on Wikipedia has long been a subject of debate, especially among educators who once discouraged its use in academic settings.
Now, thanks to an army of paid and volunteer writers, the Wikipedia platform has matured into an ever-expanding curation of informational and educational content covering a wide array of topics. This progress prompts the question of whether Wikipedia has attained the credibility of a traditional encyclopedia.
Although it would be difficult to test the actual trustworthiness of Wikipedia, as that would entail analyzing over 50 million articles, we can test how much trust people actually place in Wikipedia. So, we did just that.
The Experiment
For our study, we recruited 805 participants from two separate research platforms at two different points in time. 403 people were recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) in July 2021 and 402 people were recruited from the research platform Prolific in January 2022. All study materials, including all activities and survey questions, were kept identical for both groups.
Participants were presented with an intriguing fact attributed to either Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Britannica (randomly assigned), and then asked to rate its credibility. The instructions and fact in question, which can actually be found in both sources, were as follows.
The following fact may or may not be true:
Nikola Tesla, whose electricity innovations inspired the name of Tesla, Inc., was obsessed with pigeons. He fed and cared for thousands of them, despite being germophobic, and felt particularly fond of one white pigeon.
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica [or Wikipedia]
Nikola Tesla, whose electricity innovations inspired the name of Tesla, Inc., was obsessed with pigeons. He fed and cared for thousands of them, despite being germophobic, and felt particularly fond of one white pigeon.
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica [or Wikipedia]
After reading the fact and source, participants were asked “How strongly do you believe this information is true?” with answer options on a 1-7 Likert scale (1 = Not at all, 7 = Very much).
Results
Our findings revealed no significant difference in believability between the "Encyclopedia Britannica" attribution (avg. = 4.50) and the "Wikipedia" attribution (avg. = 4.38), (p = 0.261). Nor did we find any influence on the results from gender, age, or research platform. The results imply that, regardless of the actual credibility of the information on Wikipedia, the platform has achieved a level of believability comparable to that of a traditional encyclopedia.
Of course, there will always be dubious information on the internet. The ease with which fabricated facts can be readily shared has wrought a cacophony of misinformation that seems almost normal in the digital age. Nevertheless, Wikipedia’s careful curation of sources and information appears to have earned the general public’s trust. Just be sure to obtain the approval of your professors or teachers before citing Wikipedia in your academic works.
Methods Note
To test for significant differences in believability between the "Encyclopedia" and "Wikipedia" conditions, we employed ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis. For statistically significant results, the coefficient (i.e., the difference in averages) would be large and the corresponding p-value would be small (p < 0.05). Data and materials for this study are available upon request.