Still Not Ready for Prime Time: Academic Librarian Attitudes towards Wikipedia in a Networked Age

This PowerPoint was used for a presentation at the 10th International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society held at Universidad Complutense de Madrid at Madrid, Spain, February 7, 2014.How do information literacy librarians regard Wikipedia? Researchers (Lim, 2009, Menchen-Trevino & Hargittai, 2011) have called for greater librarian involvement in providing guidelines for the use of Wikipedia and in teaching its use to undergraduates but academic librarians have been reluctant to answer this call. To explore the reasons for this reluctance and to reveal their attitudes, the author polled information literacy librarians in the United States by a 26-item questionnaire that explored demographics as well as attitudes towards Web 2.0, collaborative learning strategies, and Wikipedia. The questionnaire received 281 completed responses for an 80% return rate. This research proved that information literacy librarians provide very little Wikipedia instruction and practically no workshops solely devoted to Wikipedia. While most respondents believe that they should be teaching students how to evaluate information responsibly in the age of Web 2.0, they most strongly disagreed when asked whether a link to Wikipedia from their library's homepage was a good idea