I have a request. My university's education department offers a graduate course in Technology utilization, and (believe it or not) wikis [in general] and Wikipedia [in particular] are part of the curriculum. I've been asked to come in as a guest speaker. The topic will be "Why should I believe anything on the Web and (especially) on Wikipedia"
So, to this end, I was looking for studies of Wikipedia and/or comparisons with other mainstream sources. Here's what I have so far. Any suggestions to add to this list would be most appreciated.
1) A group of students in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois has published a paper entitled "Information Quality Discussions in Wikipedia" (PDF format). The focus of the paper was on assessing the IQ of Wikipedia featured articles — in this case, IQ stands for "information quality" — when compared to other samples from the project, including featured article removal candidates, pages marked as NPOV disputes, and a selection of random pages. According to the paper, the study showed how seriously the Wikipedia project views issues of article quality. The authors concluded that as a quality standard, the featured article process "is not ideal, but it does seem relatively rigorous." They also noted that the process is not as resource-intensive as other possibilities, such as blind judging. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-08-01/Feature... PDF of research paper can be found at: http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~stvilia/papers/qualWiki.pdf
2) An article comparing the WP to Brockhaus and Encarta has appeared in issue 21/04 of C't, a major German computer engineering magazine. It is titled /Lexika: Wikipedia gegen Brockhaus und Encarta/, starting on p. 132 - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_vs_Brockhaus_and_Encarta Full survey results can be found at: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2004-October/035339.html
3) Computer Science professor (and minor geek rockstar) Ed Felton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Felten) posted in his blog about a small-scale survey he did of Wikipedia: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=674
-Mark