Wikipedia – research tool, appreciated by foreign students and professors, disliked by Slovenians

In my years that I spent on Faculty of social sciences, I often listened to my professors saying that Wikipedia is not a relevant source and that we are not allowed to use it as a reference in our seminar papers and essays. I understood their position in a way, because Wikipedia is a tool, which changes constantly and everyone can help to create it. That is why information is often not verified. I have to admit that I share a little bit of their hesitation, but I am not quite sure if it is because I have listened to professors’ arguments for 4 years or because I am just so distrustful when it comes to dealing with sources that are relevant for my research, especially the ones which are not published in scientific journals. But I was always curious to find out for what and how much other students use Wikipedia. So I found a research from Allison J. Head and Michael B. Eisenberg, conducted in the spring of 2009 in the U.S., which deals with the use of Wikipedia. The researchers present findings from a survey of U.S. college students on six campuses. The mayor findings of the study are:

1. Far more students, than not, used Wikipedia. Wikipedia was used in addition to a small set of other commonly used information resources at the beginning of the research process.
2. Reasons for using Wikipedia were diverse: Wikipedia provided students with a summary about a topic, the meaning of related terms, and also got students started on their research and offered a usable interface.
3. Respondents who were majoring in architecture, engineering, or the sciences were more likely to use Wikipedia than respondents in other majors.

A majority of respondents frequently used Wikipedia for background information, but less often than they used other common resources, such as course readings and Google. The findings suggest that students used Wikipedia for its summaries and to get started, and because of usability, comprehensibility, and lesser so, for credibility or its peer–to–peer capabilities.
The results of the research are very interesting (if you want to read the whole research and its findings, visit http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2830/2476), but despite that, I couldn’t help wondering if the sample (6 campuses in U.S.) is big enough to call it representative. It would probably be useful to expand the sample to more faculties. It would also be interesting to conduct a similar research in Europe and compare it to the one from U.S. But I would probably most gladly like to see the results from our home environment, that is from Slovenia. Namely, I am not sure if it is just us Slovenians that are so reserved or the whole Europe is. But I agree, that it would be a pity, that such a great tool for research, would not be made good use of and I hope that we can get rid of our hindrances in the future.

Source: Head, Alison J. and Michael B. Eisenberg. 2010. How today's college students use Wikipedia for course-related research. First Monday, vol. 5, number 3, 1. march.