Almost all Japanese Wikipedia users trust it

By Ken Y-N ( December 22, 2006 at 23:41) · Filed under Internet, Polls

Do you trust Wikipedia? graph of japanese opinion japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by goo Research into Wikipedia usage. 1,088 members of their monitor panel successfully completed the internet-based opinion poll. 47.1% of the sample was male, 20.9% in their twenties, 41.8% in their thirties, 26.5% in their forties, and 10.8% in their fifties.

This month, Japanese Wikipedia was chosen as the overall grand prize winner in the “WEB of the Year 2006″ (Japanese link) awards. In addition, on the 15th of this month it crossed the 300,000 article mark.

With Wikipedia, if I am looking up a simple fact I know I can most likely trust the article, but for not just anything remotely controversial but also others that require specialised knowledge I find myself often wondering if it is correct or not, and end up doing my own research to corraborate the data! Having said all that, I did refer today to two articles which referred to current events and I was pleased to find information that I found useful and trustworthy. On the other hand, did I find it trustworthy just because the information supported my stance on the matters concerned?

Q1: Do you know about the online encyclopedia Wikipedia? (Sample size=1,088)

Visted the site (to SQs) 69.0%

Know about it but not visited 7.7%

Don’t know about it 23.3%

These figures can be compared with a similar survey in April 2006, when just 46.5% had visited the site, and another 9.7% knew about it but hadn’t visited; the number of visitors has increased by 50% in just eight months

Q1SQ1: Do you think you can trust Wikipedia contents? (Sample size=751)

Trust it sufficiently 18.0%

Trust it to some degree 77.6%

Don’t really trust it 4.3%

Don’t trust it at all 0.1%

The percentage of people with a high degree of trust has also increased, up 3.5 percentage points on eight months ago.

Q1SQ2: In what way do you mainly use Wikipedia? (Sample size=751)

Directly look up items 62.2%

Look up items if they appear in searches 34.2%

Just keep wandering through linked articles 3.5%

Other 0.1%

The number of direct users specifically looking up Wikipedia has also increased about 50% since eight months ago.