Miloš Fidler and Dejan Lavbič. 2018. "Improving information quality of Wikipedia articles with cooperative principle", Online Information Review (OIR), 41(6), pp. 797 -811.
AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of cooperative principle on the information quality (IQ) by making objects more relevant for consumer needs, in particular case Wikipedia articles for students.Design/methodology/approach -The authors performed a quantitative study with participants being invited to complete an online survey. Each rater evaluated three selected and re-written articles from Wikipedia by four IQ dimensions (accuracy, completeness, objectivity, and representation). Grice's maxims and submaxims were used to re-write articles and make them more relevant for student cognitive needs. The results were analyzed with statistical methods of mean, standard deviation, Cronbach's α, and ICC (two-way random model of single measure).Findings -The study demonstrates that Wikipedia articles can be made more relevant for student needs by using cooperative principle with increase in IQ and also achieving higher consistency of students' scores as recent research. In particular, students in the research perceived the abstract, constructed with cooperative principle, more objective and complete as reported in recent research.Practical implications -The work can benefit encyclopedia editors to improve IQ of existing articles as well as consumers that would obtain more relevant information in less reading time.Originality/value -This is one of the first attempts to empirically investigate the application of cooperate principle to make objects more relevant for consumer needs and impact of this on IQ. IQ improvement evidence is provided and impacts on IQ dimensions such as objectivity, completeness, accuracy, and representation for research community to validate and compare results.
KeywordsConversation maxims, Cooperative principle, Improving information quality, Information quality assessment and analysis, Interrater reliability, Presenting information in relevant way arXiv:1807.03774v1 [cs.CY] 6 Jul 2018 into definition of information quality (IQ) as a multi-dimensional concept with dimensions such as accuracy, consistency, completeness, timeliness, and representation.The majority of the previous IQ research was conducted by employing students to measure quality of online objects, mostly Wikipedia articles (Kogut and Zander, 1996;Stenmark, 2000). Authors investigated how students perceived IQ dimensions, but did not advance their research with recommendations regarding IQ improvement (Metzger, 2007). A step forward was made by (Mai, 2013), who theoretically discussed the possibility of using the Grice's maxims to construct objects from which consumers could retrieve more relevant information for specific purpose or context of use. Grice's maxims are recommendations used within the cooperative principle for effective communication between two conversing parties, such as be relevant and clear, make messages as inf...