The use and sharing of information from Wikipedia by high-tech professionals for work purposes

摘要

Purpose - The aim of this paper is to focus on discovering whether high-tech professionals as a user community search for information from Wikipedia to fulfill their job duties and, if they do, how they share information with co-workers and clients.rnDesign/methodology/approach - An online questionnaire was used, administered by a commercial provider. The questionnaire consisted of 15 Likert-scaled questions to assess participants' agreement with each question along with an optional open-ended explanation. A total of 68 participants successfully answered the questionnaire. Participants' Likert rating scores were analyzed by two-way ANOVA, one-way ANOVA and correlational analyses using SPSS. Findings - The analyses examined relationships among participants' characteristics, their use of information resources for research and teaching, information-sharing behaviors, and useon-use of Wikipedia. Findings indicated that the participants treated Wikipedia as a ready reference for general information. Their concern is that Wikipedia only has a limited number of entries available at this point. They suggested that Wikipedia needed to improve the contribution and editorial process and to make it more rigorous.rnOriginality/value - Personal information infrastructure affects how the high-tech professionals surveyed use-and-share information from Wikipedia for work. In the current situation, the participants consider Wikipedia to be a developing information resource and show less interest in contributing to it. The project is an exploratory study and more considerations are needed for this research area.