On 11/30/06, Josef Kolbitsch josef.kolbitsch@tugraz.at wrote:
I have been doing research on Wikipedia for about 2.5 years, and I have met many users of Wikipedia that had no idea that it was not authored by experts
The aspect that is differenciating between Wikipedia and, hmm, let's say Britannica is not the question of experts editing. At Wikipedia, experts are editing without payment and secondly, the expert does not have to prove his skills before he/she is granted write access to Wikipedia. In the past years of my work, I have met quite a lot of people who don't have the slightest idea how traditional encyclopedias are written.
and that the information provided might actually be incorrect. Therefore I am planning to do a questionnaire on the "Awareness of Wikipedia's Concept" (or something like that).
[...]
Any comments?
Sounds like a great idea and I would love to see the results. It might be useful to see if the people answering the questionaire show any "Awareness of the concept of an encyclopedia" at all and the reality of traditional style encyclopedias at the market.
Have fun, Mathias