The Use and Sharing of Information from Wikipedia by High-Tech Professionals for Work Purposes

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. Design/methodology/approach: An online questionnaire was used, administered by a commercial provider. The questionnaire consisted of 15 Likert-scaled questions to assess participants\u27 agreement with each question along with an optional open-ended explanation. A total of 68 participants successfully answered the questionnaire. Participants\u27 Likert rating scores were analyzed by two-way ANOVA, one-way ANOVA and correlational analyses using SPSS. Findings: The analyses examined relationships among participants\u27 characteristics, their use of information resources for research and teaching, information-sharing behaviors, and use/non-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. Originality/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