Reference Blindness: The Influence of References on Trust in Wikipedia

Lucassen, Teun and Noordzij, Matthijs L. and Schraagen, Jan Maarten (2011) Reference Blindness: The Influence of References on Trust in Wikipedia. In: ACM WebSci '11, June 14-17 2011, Koblenz, Germany.

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Abstract:	In this study we show the in uence of references on trust in information. We changed the contents of reference lists of Wikipedia articles in such a way that the new references were no longer in any sense related to the topic of the arti- cle. Furthermore, the length of the reference list was varied. College students were asked to evaluate the credibility of these articles. Only 6 out of 23 students noticed the manip- ulation of the references; 9 out of 23 students noticed the variations in length. These numbers are remarkably low, as 17 students indicated they considered references an impor- tant indicator of credibility. The �ndings suggest a highly heuristic manner of credibility evaluation. Systematic eval- uation behavior was also observed in the experiment, but only of participants with low trust in Wikipedia in general.
Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item
Faculty:	Behavioural Sciences (BS)
Research Group:	Cognitive Psychology and Ergonomics (CPE)
Link to this item:	http://purl.utwente.nl/publications/77657
Conference URL:	http://www.websci11.org/
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