The Content Quality of Wikipedia

In this week's readings, the debate about the credibility of Wikipedia really interests me, and since I have done a bit research about the information quality of Wikipedia during last semester, it reminds me of two impressive scholarly articles that had discussed the topic from a very interesting view. 

The first article "Information quality assessment of community generated content: A user study of Wikipedia" regarded Wikipedia as a collaborative-writing environment, and it focused on the evaluation of the quality of information in Wikipedia and found sixty-four volunteer users to assess the quality of five articles from the Hebrew Wikipedia, in order to figure out the highest and the lowest quality articles with explanations. The results of the research showed that attributes such as the quantity of information, satisfaction with content and outsourcing links were mentioned frequently. 

The other article is named "Wikipedia - Free and Reliable?", written by Maria Mattus. In the research, she paid attention to several themes such as passive and active users, and the origins and creation of articles, etc. Moreover, the author focused on the "unfinishedness" of the encyclopedia and cared about its development in various directions, which is really enlightening. 

Yaari, Eti, Shifra Baruchson-Arbib, and Judit Bar-Ilan. "Information quality assessment of   community generated content: A user study of Wikipedia." Journal of Information Science 37, no. 5 (October 2011): 487-498, accessed December 20, 2013. 

Mattus, Maria. "Wikipedia - Free and Reliable?" NORDICOM Review 30, no. 1 (May 2009): 183-199, accessed December 20, 2013.