Crowdsourcing credibility: The impact of audience feedback on Web page credibility

Abstract

Social feedback in the form of audience ratings, community tags, recommendations, and text comments is becoming increasingly commonplace on the Web. Prior research has uncovered a number of Web site features that can impact its perceived credibility. However, to date research has not investigated whether social feedback on a Web page can influence the perceived credibility of the information on the page or increase or decrease the likelihood that an individual will subsequently use the information contained within it. This paper describes a study investigating whether one type of social feedback, audience ratings, can influence perceptions of credibility. The results of the study suggest that the type of audience feedback, positive, mixed, or negative, can influence perceptions of credibility while the size of the audience giving feedback does not. Also, audience feedback does not appear to increase the likelihood of use of the information on a web page.

Web credibility assessment: Conceptualization, operationalization, variability, and models

“…In Metzger, Flanagin, and Medders's () study, the proportion of negative to positive reviews on feedback systems or reputation systems was an important cue/marker when making credibility evaluations. Giudice () also showed that mixed stances of user feedback on an issue (i.e., both positive and negative) influenced perceptions of web credibility. In that study, a web page with positive or mixed user feedback was perceived as more credible than a web page with negative feedback only; however, there was no statistically significant difference in credibility ratings between positive and mixed feedback.…”

Predicting webpage credibility using linguistic features

“…Popularity is correlated with credibility. Giudice shows that more people visiting web site usually means more credible content [5].…”

Wikipedia e le regole per la scrittura delle voci di storia. Tecnologia e socialità nella produzione di contenuti

“…About the specific tendency, authors such as Reichwald and Piller [41] make reference to the development of a new product, Kleeman et al [13] speak of the exploitation of creative ideas, and Poetz and Schreier [39] contemplate idea generation. Beside the collected definitions, authors such as Giudice [53] are more concrete in the way they propose rating, recommendation, or text comments.…”