More than 2,000 students from six colleges and universities in the United States, including both public and private universities and four- and two-year colleges, were surveyed for the study. Students at Princeton did not participate in the study.
The study found that 82 percent of respondents reported using Wikipedia to obtain background information on a topic. While 52 percent reported that they were frequent users, only 22 percent said that they rarely, if ever, used the website. Students in four-year colleges were also more likely than those in two-year colleges to use Wikipedia for research.
Princeton students, librarians and faculty alike agreed that Wikipedia serves as a good starting point for research but should not be used as a cited source.
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Nancy Pressman-Levy, head of Stokes Library, said that non-students also make frequent use of Wikipedia. “Even faculty use it to get started on a topic when you don’t know anything about it and you need a quick source to consult,” she explained.
“You just have to be very careful about the information, as you need to with all websites,” she added, because “there’s no authority behind it.”
History professor Philip Nord expressed a similar sentiment. “I look at Wikipedia all the time, but I wouldn’t ever rely on it, nor would I advise students to do it,” he said
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The study’s findings that more science than humanities majors and more students at four-year colleges than two-year colleges use Wikipedia, along with the existance of an inverse correlation between Wikipedia usage and library usage, surprised some members of the University community.
Pressman-Levy noted that she did not expect “to see a stronger emphasis on science majors” using Wikipedia, adding that “students use Wikipedia on campus across the board. I work with social science students and faculty, and all seem to be heavy users of Wikipedia.”
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
