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The Use and Sharing of Information from Wikipedia by High-Tech Professionals for Work Purposes

Abstract

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to focus on discovering whether high-tech professionals as a user community search for information from Wikipedia to fulfill their job duties and, if they do, how they share information with co-workers and clients.

Design/methodology/approach: An online questionnaire was used, administered by a commercial provider. The questionnaire consisted of 15 Likert-scaled questions to assess participants' agreement with each question along with an optional open-ended explanation. A total of 68 participants successfully answered the questionnaire. Participants' Likert rating scores were analyzed by two-way ANOVA, one-way ANOVA and correlational analyses using SPSS.

Findings: The analyses examined relationships among participants' characteristics, their use of information resources for research and teaching, information-sharing behaviors, and use/non-use of Wikipedia. Findings indicated that the participants treated Wikipedia as a ready reference for general information. Their concern is that Wikipedia only has a limited number of entries available at this point. They suggested that Wikipedia needed to improve the contribution and editorial process and to make it more rigorous.

Originality/value: Personal information infrastructure affects how the high-tech professionals surveyed use-and-share information from Wikipedia for work. In the current situation, the participants consider Wikipedia to be a developing information resource and show less interest in contributing to it. The project is an exploratory study and more considerations are needed for this research area.

Department(s)

Library and Learning Resources

Keywords and Phrases

Electronic media; Encyclopaedias; Generation and dissemination of information; Individual behaviour; Worldwide web

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

0264-0473

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2009 Emerald Group Publishing Limited, All rights reserved.

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