A more exhaustive literature review of issues surrounding Wikipedia, the history of Wikipedia, and current research threads concerning Wikipedia can be found in the paper: “Wikipedia as an Academic Reference: Faculty and Student Viewpoints.”²

Maness recognized that Web 2.0 technologies were altering the information literacy landscape and defined “Library 2.0” as a new paradigm for librarianship.³ This definition included web-based technologies and web-based library services such as synchronous messaging, streaming media, blogs and wikis, social networks, tagging, RSS feeds, and mashups as tools for today’s libraries and librarians. Wikipedia is specifically mentioned as a site that librarians are cautious about due to its open editing policies. However, Maness also states that “this of course does not eliminate their value, it merely changes librarianship, complicates collection development and information literacy instruction.”⁴ Maness advocates for using Wikipedia, but also warns that librarians need to understand Wikipedia and be critical in using it.

Shachaf compares Wikipedia’s reference desk services to traditional reference desk services using the SERVQUAL quality variables: reliability (accuracy, completeness, and verifiability), responsiveness, and assurance.⁵ The study revealed that “the Wikipedia Reference Desk provides answers that are as accurate as those that traditional (and digital) reference librarians provide.”⁶ Shachaf concludes with the statement “perhaps social reference is one of the ‘Web 2.0 world [that] can and should appear as a part of formal library and information science courses.’”⁷ Anderson agrees, expressing concern that information education (library science) is threatened with becoming irrelevant, partly due to the rate of change occurring in digital environments.⁸

East, in a paper discussing subject encyclopedias in the digital age, writes, “Educators became increasingly concerned about the dubious quality of the information that their students were using, and librarians began to see a new role for themselves in teaching the evaluation of information found on the web” while discussing information retrieval on the Internet.⁹ East points out that with the digitization of information, librarians must keep appraised of the changes and challenges of the digital information world.¹⁰

In a paper assessing the quality of Wikipedia articles, West and Williamson assert the following:

It seems that the ongoing professional discussion about whether Wikipedia is good or bad is irrelevant. It exists; it is being used. It is a logical starting point for research for many individuals; it is particularly good as a definition tool that acts as a springboard for further research. . . . Wikipedia has a place within the context of information gathering.¹¹

This statement illustrates the need for what Michael Stephens calls a next-generation librarian, one who is familiar with Web 2.0 tools and social software, and one who can train library users (and other librarians) on the use of these tools for information retrieval and evaluation.¹²

Rand advocates for using Wikipedia to teach digital literacy skills and exploring information quality issues. Rand also points out that freely accessible articles online are more frequently referenced in Wikipedia because they can be linked on the Wikipedia article’s page.¹³ These links to other information sources are one of the features that make Wikipedia a popular starting point for many students and faculty.¹⁴ Murley notes that the greatest value of a Wikipedia article could be its links to relevant sources outside of Wikipedia, something that many traditional encyclopedias lack.¹⁵

Information seekers (students, faculty, librarians, others) enjoy the “information security” that peer-review brings. In an article comparing Wikipedia to Scholarpedia (a peer reviewed online encyclopedia) Stankus and Spiegel compare reference lists between articles with the exact same title.¹⁶ They find that both encyclopedias offer “references to solid materials and that any differences in quality indicators represent matters of degree rather than any clear-cut advantage.”¹⁷ This is an addition to the work of Giles published in Nature that compared Wikipedia articles to Encyclopedia Britannica online articles and found that the two were similar, and that the minor errors in both “did not seriously affect the overall value of the articles.”¹⁸ One of the issues of concern is given in table 1.¹⁹

Table 1 illustrates what is becoming known as “the power of the masses” that has taken shape under the guise of web 2.0. While peer-review is preferred, the time to build a peer-reviewed encyclopedia can be lengthy, and the amount of work involved staggering. Netizens have built Wikipedia at the rate of 367,575 articles/year, an example of wikinomics (mass collaboration) at work. These issues (time and work) are why the online peer-reviewed encyclopedias have so few entries. In addition to the power of the masses (the existence of peer review could be argued in an open editing environment) there is an inherent power in linked data as more and more researchers turn to the web as their initial research tool. Schreur states that “linked data has the potential to revolutionize the academic world of information creation and exchange.”²⁰ Understanding the speed at which information can be created in the digital universe and the complications with information literacy at this speed (is the article accurate? is the article complete? does the article have proper sources?) of creation is critical for librarians to understand to better assist patrons in their information searches. Wikipedia illustrates this phenomenon and has given researchers (and librarians) much to discuss over the past years.

Demographic differences in Wikipedia usage have also been the subject of study by authors. Lim and Kwon found that males tend to use Wikipedia more than females, enhancing their information literacy skills in the Web 2.0 environment. The findings also indicate that males use Wikipedia more than females for entertainment or idle reading, but no differences were observed in Wikipedia usage for academic purposes.²¹ Waller studies Wikipedia usage based on lifestyle groups (privileged, academic, young, . . . , farming stock, suburban, community disconnect) and found that Wikipedia users constitute higher income and higher educational attainment groups.²²

Waller also notes that more research is needed on how Wikipedia is actually used based on examining different user groups. This paper begins to address these concerns and adds to the literature by presenting usage statistics for a group of librarians and compares these usage statistics to previously gathered statistics for university faculty and students.²³

A survey instrument for librarians was developed in the fall semester of 2010 (Appendix) and distributed to all library directors in a western United States library consortium. The consortium is composed of nine academic libraries (public schools, colleges) and thirteen public libraries. This convenience sample was selected because the author’s institution belongs to the consortium, and name recognition was assumed to increase the response rate. Each library director distributed the surveys to their staff, then collected and returned them to the researcher. There are 22 libraries in the consortium, and ten of these libraries responded to the survey yielding 58 usable surveys. The survey respondents included:

• seven reference librarians;
• six adult/youth services librarians;
• two electronic resource librarians;
• five directors;
• four technical services librarians;
• one distance services librarian; and
• 23 respondents who did not report their job title.

It is interesting to note that the job titles of some librarians include technical services, distance services, and electronic resource, indicative of the trend toward online and electronic needs of the modern library.

This research study explores the following questions:

• Are librarians using Wikipedia?
• Are there gender differences in Wikipedia usage in the librarian group?
• Are there usage differences between school year and non-school year times?
• What are librarians using Wikipedia for?
• How do librarians view Wikipedia as an information source?
• How aware are librarians of positive and negative issues surrounding Wikipedia?
• How do librarian statistics compare to university faculty and student results?

Questions concerning “awareness” of positive (page rank features for example) and negative (vandalism of pages for example) issues were incorporated into the survey to explore their effects on usage patterns of Wikipedia. Descriptive statistics are used to explore librarians’ perceptions of Wikipedia and their usage statistics for this web-based information resource. The survey instrument primarily collected Likert scale data; so much of the data discussion is centered on non-parametric tests of medians. For discussion purposes, the mean and standard deviation are reported for some variables as well. The test results are computed using SPSS, and the results are reported in the style of Field.²⁴

A majority of librarians in this study are using Wikipedia (83 percent) which compares favorably to previous studies of faculty (70 percent) and students (77 percent). Librarians in this study are using Wikipedia for research (63 percent), but more for personal use (90 percent) and less in assisting library patrons (53 percent). This indicates that librarians in this study are cautious in advocating for Wikipedia in their work life, but utilize it in their personal information quests. The cautionary use of Wikipedia by these groups is most likely driven by awareness of the negative aspects of Wikipedia. These negative issues have given way to new editing policies and article creation policies in an attempt to strengthen the content of Wikipedia, which the user groups in this study were less aware of. Awareness of both aspects of a publicly created and utilized information resource will lead all groups to be better at online information literacy in the digital age. Librarians need to be aware of both positive and negative aspects of information resources on the web to assess their information content and to train patrons to evaluate web-based information resources critically.

Librarians in this study ranked the awareness issues the same as university faculty and students, with greater awareness of the negative features of Wikipedia and less awareness of the positive features of Wikipedia. These results agree with those of previous studies illustrating that librarians (as well as faculty and students) need to learn more about Wikipedia to assess the usefulness of this knowledge source in the age of the digital library.

Ranking systems exist for movies, academic journals, and for Wikipedia. The Wikipedia ranking system enables information seekers to view the quality of an article as a component of an information verification system as practiced by individuals who seek and use information. This ranking system requires that a user be logged-on to the Wikipedia site and enable the gadget for article rank. After this, when a user requests an article, an assessment of the article’s quality is contained as part of the article header. The rankings are similar to a grade of the article’s quality and range from stub (a very basic description of the topic) to C-class article, to B-class article, to A-class article, to FA-class article (encyclopedic quality). However, only 6.3 percent of the librarians in this study had accounts on Wikipedia and would be able to activate this gadget. Again, this indicates that librarians are not aware of the positive aspects of Wikipedia, thus cannot illustrate these to their patrons as they search for valid information online.

A surprising result from this research is that faculty and librarians seem to be using Wikipedia more than students in these study groups. This result was unexpected, as students in the twenty-first century are being classified as “digital natives” and are embedded in technology and information seeking activities, while librarians and faculty are perceived to be more skeptical about this information source. Further, figure 2 indicates that the school-age population is actively engaged in Wikipedia usage. This would suggest that librarians need to utilize, appropriately, Wikipedia to generate interest in information seeking and information literacy to further connect with their school-age patrons.

Library 2.0, as defined by Maness, ³³ is “communally innovative,” meaning that as communities change, libraries must change and must allow the users (patrons) to change the library. Wikipedia as a top ten website (globally) and Wikipedia usage statistics as depicted in figure 2 indicate that this is a web resource netizens are embracing and librarians need to educate themselves to all aspects of this knowledge repository, not just the negative, high profile misuses of the site.

This study agreed with what other studies have indicated, that people (students, faculty, and librarians) are using Wikipedia. It also suggests that males are using Wikipedia more than females. This study benchmarked usage statistics for a librarian group and illustrated that negative awareness outweighs positive awareness with regard to issues surrounding Wikipedia. It is posited that this difference in awareness is a major factor in the usage (or not) of Wikipedia.