Indicator of quality for environmental articles on Wikipedia at the higher education level

Abstract

Wikipedia is important in higher education because students and scholars often use it. Nevertheless, the issue of Wikipedia’s quality is an obstacle for its use at the higher education level. In order to contribute to this discussion, we have proposed ‘Verifiability by respected sources’ as an indicator for assessing the quality of Wikipedia articles at the higher education level and conducted an analysis of the most frequently visited articles in the category of Environment on Wikipedia. Results show that these articles contain many unreferenced statements, so their usage at the higher education level is problematic. Therefore, we also propose specific steps for relevant actors that could help to improve the quality of Wikipedia.

The role of Wikipedia in the dissemination of new knowledge: Analysis of the entry «desinformación» as a changeable concept

“…To formulate a descriptive exposition of those characteristics, elements, properties or features of the situation or phenomenon under study (Pinto, 2018), the latest edition of the text -November 2021-of this online encyclopaedia was selected. Despite the fact that some articles are more susceptible to experiencing a continuous number of edits (Petiška & Moldan, 2021), it was observed that, in this sense, the term desinformación is a relatively stable concept to date, with an average, according to Wikipedia's own statistics, of 1.3 edits per month since its creation in 2005.…”

“…Thus, the measure adopted by Wikipedia is understandable, given the infodemic context in which the entry was created, i.e., when the abundance of information was excessive and confusing and users needed credible and reliable information to make accurate decisions about their health and other issues. On the other hand, that measure also reopened the debate about the delegation of Wikipedia knowledge to, exclusively, the hands of scientists and experts (Aibar et al, 2016;Konieczny, 2021;Petiška & Moldan, 2021). Likewise, it also evidenced the existence of "noisy" or "contradictory" articles that should be discarded (Hsu et al, 2021) and the use of Wikipedia for ideological purposes (Quian, 2021).…”

“…However, the real influence of Wikipedia on society is not limited to descriptive figures and statistics but must be approached in a more holistic way by establishing itself as a global, open and collaborative encyclopaedia (Saorín, 2012), an essential piece of the general ecosystem of knowledge (Vandendorpe, 2015); that is a source of consultation and learning (Schmied, 2021) widely used by students in primary education (Cuenca & González, 2018), secondary education (Cuquet & García San Pedro, 2019) and higher education (Obregón & González, 2018;Petiška & Moldan, 2021); that contributes to open knowledge (Ricaurte-Quijano & Carli-Alvarez, 2016); that is the subject of scientific research in numerous disciplines (Tramullas, 2015;Claes & Tramullas, 2021a, 2021bSchmied, 2021); and, more recently, that plays a role during the pandemic caused by COVID-19 (Ruprechter et al, 2021). This last fact coincides with Quian's (2021) idea that Wikipedia has become a thermometer of the interest generated by a topic on the internet and helps to understand and interpret reality in a synthetic way (Vandendorpe, 2015).…”

Verhütung in der deutschsprachigen Wikipedia: Eine Inhalts- und Qualitätsanalyse

“…Einige Studien bescheinigen der gemeinschaftlich von einer Vielzahl von Menschen erstellten (Crowd-basierten) Wikipedia eine Inhaltsqualität, die mit derjenigen von Quellen vergleichbar ist, die von Fachleuten erstellt werden, – etwa herkömmlichen Enzyklopädien [ 18 , 19 ], Sachbüchern [ 20 ] und Krankenkassenwebsites [ 21 ]. Gleichzeitig weisen die vorliegenden Studienergebnisse auf deutliche Qualitätsunterschiede innerhalb der Wikipedia hin: So werden Wikipedia-Einträge zu Themen von großer öffentlicher Bedeutung häufiger gelesen und überarbeitet, was zu besserer Qualität führt im Vergleich zu Einträgen über Nischenthemen [ 22 , 23 ].…”

“…B. Einfügen neuer Textabschnitte und neuer Quellen). Es zeigten sich sehr enge positive Zusammenhänge zwischen der Artikellänge und der Anzahl der beteiligten Autor*innen (r = 0,85, p < 0,001) sowie der Häufigkeit von Überarbeitungen (r = 0,84, p < 0,001; [ 23 , 48 ]).…”