A Quantitative Comparison for Online Encyclopedias －A Case Study of High Quality Articles of Wikipedia and Knol
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Wu, Hsin-Yi
Abstract
This study attempts to compare online encyclopedias in a quantitative approach, and conducts three important research designs. One is choosing research targets, that is, Wikipedia and Knol. After deciding the encyclopedis, researcher analyzes and presents their differences. The second step is developing 6 indices, including page views per year, text words, readability, cited numbers per year, citation numbers, and citation types. These indices represent the popularity of the topics, content richness, readability levels, use how much sources to write articles, and width (percentage) and depth (assess) of the citations, respectively. The third step is setting up two main sampling rules, which sample the same topics and choose the high quality articles. According to the sampling rules, totally 20 topics are selected. Finally, the researcher compares the differences using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, suggests the ways to improve systems and construct articles.
The research results show that page views per year, cited numbers per year, citation numbers, and impact factor are statistically significant based on confidence level at 0.95, but the remaining indices are not.
The major findings are shown as follows. When it comes to page views per year and cited numbers per year, values of Wikipedia are higher. However, Wikipedia can be written by everyone, users must use it cautiously and need to cultivate the ability of identifying the authenticity of information to avoid absorbing wrong messages. Although Knol has already set up an assessment criterion, which emphasizes pageviews, reviews and comments, for selecting the best articles, and still has 8 articles without citations. Knol should take it as a serious problem and force to set up related standards. Besides, the readability of Wikipedia and Knol is 12. Due to American adult literacy survey, the readability of these topics is too high to read. Two encyclopedias have not yet set service objects which can depend on to adjust the degree of readability levels.
Subjects
Online encyclopedias
Type
thesis
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