The Perceived Credibility of Online Encyclopedias Among Children

This study examined young people’s trust of Wikipedia as an information resource. A large-scale probability-based survey with embedded quasi-experiments was conducted with 2,747 children in the U.S. ranging from 11 to 18 years old. Results show that young people find Wikipedia to be fairly credible, but also exhibit an awareness of potential problems with non-expert, user-generated content in anonymous environments. Children tend to evaluate the credibility of online encyclopedia information with this in mind, at times with what appears to be an unwarranted devaluation of this information.