世論 What Japan Thinks

I think all my readers know my position on the trustworthiness or otherwise of Wikipedia; what I trust as an information source is the Beeb, followed by a few UK newspapers. For information about Japan in English, quite frankly I cannot really trust any commercial source, and those with user feedback are in fact one of the reasons I started WJT. To see what the Japanese themselves trust, as part of their 132nd Ranking Research, DIMSDRIVE Research asked what sources of information people could trust.

Demographics

Between the 19th and 27th of December 2007 4,044 members of the DIMSDRIVE Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 56.5% were female, 13.6% in their twenties, 31.5% in their thirties, 34.6% in their forties, 13.6% in their fifties, and 5.8% aged sixty or older.

Here, the trust being investigated is the reliability or usefulness of the information provided by the site, I believe. Given the high newspaper readership in Japan, it is very surprising that newspapers rate quite low, beaten by portals (which use these very newspapers as their sources!) and even shopping sites!

Other interesting results outside the top 10 were that the Yomiuri Online was the number three newspaper at position 23. kakaku.com was number 13, my favourite comparision shopping and user review site. For communities, mixi was 20th, beaten by the cesspit that is 2 channel, a bulletin board that caters on the whole for racists and tinfoil hats; young men seemed to be those that trusted there the most.

Ranking results

Q: What internet information source can you trust the most? (Sample size=4,044, free answer)

Rank	Site	Votes
1	Yahoo! JAPAN	1,328
2	Google	615
3	Rakuten Shopping Mall	294
4	MSN	210
5	goo	177
6	Wikipedia	134
7	NIKKEI NET	87
8	asahi.com	74
9	BIGLOBE	64
10	EC Navi	63

Q: What internet information source can you trust the most? (Sample size=4,044, by sex, free answer)

Rank	Male N=1,760	Votes	Female N=2,284	Votes
1	Yahoo! JAPAN	561	Yahoo! JAPAN	767
2	Google	313	Google	302
3	MSN	114	Rakuten Shopping Mall	205
4	Rakuten Shopping Mall	89	MSN	96
5	Wikipedia	72	MSN	96
6	goo	70	Wikipedia	62
7	NIKKEI NET	59	EC Navi	44
8	asahi.com	48	Infoseek	34
9	BIGLOBE	32	BIGLOBE	32
10=	@nifty	29	@cosme	31
10=	Kakaku.com	29