Kognitiv auktoritet och Wikipedia : En analys av gymnasieelevers källkritiska granskning av Wikipedia

Sammanfattning: The main purpose of this master’s thesis is to examine how high school students evaluate the quality of the information available on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. By doing quantitative research based on questionnaires we expected to find that the means for judging that students use in this situation are most frequently based on a text’s intrinsic qualities in the point of view of its content. It was also our presupposition that 18 and 19 year old high school graduates have received some education in information research and authoritative sources on the Internet. From this assumption we assessed that, while not always using methods recommended by experts, the students use Wikipedia with a high level of healthy suspicion. We considered Patrick Wilson’s theory about cognitive authority to be valid for these assumptions. Though generalizations based on a large sample reduce an understanding of each individual’s expected behavior during information qualitiy evaluation, conclusions could be drawn about which criteria most individuals in this age use in a situation like this. The results show that though intrinsic plausibility has great significance in the students’ evaluation of quality, looking for outside sources is still the main criteria for credibility. It was further discovered that the students in the study used a wide variety of criteria apart from intrinsic plausibility and examining outside sources. This can be of certain significance for future research because it gives us valuable information about the behavior of high school students in terms of information research.