Students’ Perception of Wikipedia as an Academic Information Source

Wikipedia telah menjadi bagian integral dari pendidikan belakangan ini. Namun kredibilitas dan kemampuannya untuk berfungsi sebagai sumber daya akademik yang efisien masih menjadi perhatian. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengevaluasi persepsi mahasiswa Bangladesh terhadap Wikipedia sebagai sumber informasi. Untuk penelitian kuantitatif ini, penulis menggunakan kuesioner terstruktur dengan pertanyaan tertutup untuk mengumpulkan data. Sebanyak 336 siswa dari beberapa institusi Bangladesh yang dipilih dengan menggunakan metode random sampling menjadi populasi penelitian ini. Data yang terkumpul dianalisis dengan menggunakan IBM SPSS Statistics 25. Uji Kruskal Wallis dan Mann-Whitney U digunakan untuk menguji hipotesis. Studi ini menemukan bahwa siswa secara teratur menggunakan Wikipedia untuk tugas akademik dan tugas kelas mereka. Sebagian besar siswa (N=296, 88,1%) menganggap Wikipedia pantas digunakan dalam konteks studi universitas. Studi ini adalah upaya pertama di Bangladesh untuk menyelidiki seberapa sering dan mengapa mahasiswa menggunakan Wikipedia dalam karya akademis mereka dan apakah


INTRODUCTION
Regardless of how easy it is to incorporate digital technologies in the educational setting, there are some arguments over using Web-based applications and materials for educational use, for example Wikipedia.Wikipedia, co-founded by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales in early 2001, is a non-profit, multidisciplinary, online encyclopedia that is completely created by volunteers.Wales has earlier launched Nupedia, a similar venture.It was an encyclopedia that was accessible over the internet with submissions prepared by professionals that was open-source, implying that anybody can utilize, share, duplicate, and change it.Wikipedia, which is more than twenty-one years old, already has 55 million articles in 309 languages, including more than 6.4 million in English (Druck & Miklan, 2008;Flanagin & Metzger, 2011;Garrison, 2018).Wikipedia identifies itself as a wiki-based, openly modifiable online encyclopedia with stuff that is accessible for free.Users can write and edit articles, but only in certain circumstances can they alter them.Since its debut in 2001, it has established itself as a standard tool for formal and informal learning, as well as pleasure.The educational value of Wikipedia has just recently been acknowledged by academics, regardless of the fact that it has been operating since 2001.Previous study have written a thorough guide on how to use Wikipedia in higher education (Bayliss, 2013;Zou et al., 2020).This guide contains categories of potential tasks including critical analysis of current articles, expanding and improving current articles, and developing new entries, among other things.The popularity of Wikipedia among students may also be attributed to its abundance of the kind of background material required for the successful production of research.According to previous study Wikipedia's transparent and participatory character encourages readers to challenge the information they are reading in a manner that expertdriven, static reference materials do not (Kuhlthau, 2004).In recent years, the use of Wikipedia in education has been put into practice in a significant number of instances and has spread to become a widespread practice.Wikipedia is currently an incorporated perspective in the scholastic obligations of bachelor degree students in Australia (Evenstein Sigalov & Nachmias, 2017;Soler-Adillon et al., 2018).Undergrads use Wikipedia related to different pedigrees of information, and it fits their demands as far as inclusion, currency, comfort, and integrity.The authors came to the conclusion that these criteria outweighed the information's reliability (or lack thereof) (Head & Eisenberg, 2010;Selwyn & Gorard, 2016).
Students had a pleasant experience with Wikipedia, but were only to some degree content with the quality and precision of the substance.The Wikipedia content was contemporary, and the students used references and connections to find further information (Kim & Sin, 2011;Lim, 2009).Students assessed Wikipedia as a secondary source giving a prologue to the theme in an examination done by on their impressions of its usefulness.Students in higher education were discovered to use Wikipedia more frequently.There is a substantial corpus of research that looks into undergraduate students' behavior when completing research for class assignments.The dispute over institutions' roles in promoting Wikipedia can bring to light ideological and cultural goals that may or may not struggle with Wikipedia's lack of bias, as well as the foundation's own advancement and worldwide prominence (Hale, 2015;Lages et al., 2016;Miquel-Ribé & Laniado, 2016).The views of both the faculties they attend and their classmates affect how much students rely on Wikipedia.Despite the fact that Wikipedia's breadth and size continue to expand, instructors and school librarians remain concerned about students' usage of Wikipedia for research.
Previous study investigated how classroom instructors and librarians perceive the impact of students' usage of Wikipedia on the quality of their research projects, as well as the need for a school policy governing Wikipedia use (Polk et al., 2015).The findings clearly imply that education, rather than restricted access, is the key to properly interacting with Wikipedia.Since University students more often do research online, many professors who give research-focused homework in their classes have found that Wikipedia is their worst enemy.Numerous studies that looked at how and why students used Wikipedia also looked at the factors that influenced their decision.Although students utilized Wikipedia for a variety of purposes as previous study stated that the majority of respondents were drawn to it solely for its information utility (Head & Eisenberg, 2010).Wikipedia, on the one hand, gives a chance to teach pupils, but it also raises questions about its veracity and research (Garrison, 2018;Selwyn & Gorard, 2016).There are certain things that people don't recognize, such as the fact that Wikipedia has the same format as a blog and that the truth must be reviewed.Although Wikipedia's collaborative openness is one of the reasons for its success, it also serves as a source of vandalism, prejudice, and mistake, among other issues.Wikipedia has been vigorously scrutinized by scholastics.Some detractors interpreted it as proof that mediocrity had triumphed over skill (Druck & Miklan, 2008;Lim, 2009).In Hong Kong in 2013, the usefulness and veracity of Wikipedia information were investigated.The relationship between data helpfulness and reception was completely intervened by trust, which assumed a critical part in impacting data reception.While many users believe that the presentation of content on many free websites is more accessible than private databases' thesaurus and field searches, the material may not be inspected to the same extent as their counterparts that have been modified or peer-reviewed.Wikipedia does not include original research, unlike academic journal articles (Shen et al., 2013;Xiao & Askin, 2014).That is why it is often regarded as an inferior or a dubious source.
Although Wikipedia could be applied in numerous ways to aid students in developing their analytical and academic writing abilities (Konieczny, 2016;Wallace & Van Fleet, 2005).Teachers and school librarians continue to be concerned about kids using Wikipedia for research despite the site's continued expansion in terms of both scope and scale.There are several elements of Wikipedia that make it a worthwhile subject for future study, according to extensive current research in the area.However, there hasn't been any research into the phenomenon of using Wikipedia for academic purposes in Bangladesh.As Wikipedia is so intimately related to academic pursuits, more research is required to determine its benefits, flaws, and academic potential as well as students' perceptions of its value as a source of academic information.The purpose of this research was to analyze students favored Wikipedia and if they trusted it.

METHODS
The study is quantitative in nature and thus paper employed questionnaire survey method to acquire the information regarding student's perception and experience with Wikipedia.The target population were the students from various universities of Bangladesh, with the majority of the students from University of Dhaka.To gather information from the students, a standardized questionnaire was employed, which was designed using Google forms incorporating 15 close ended questions.Five-point Likert scale and Seven-point Likert scale questions were included to gather responses from the students.All of the questions were self-developed by the investigators.The questionnaire was divided into three sections.Through the first section, demographic and academic data of the students were collected; the second section included questions on students' perception of Wikipedia as an academic resource; and the third part of the questionnaire contained questions about students' affiliation with Wikipedia.The students were given the questionnaire through various social media channels, such as Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Gmail.The questionnaire was pilot tested before starting the original survey.
The data collection process took a period of one month, from the last week of December 2021 to the last week of January 2022.During this time, 336 responses were collected and analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics 25.A random sampling method was used to collect the data.To measure students' agreement with the perceptions of Wikipedia's credibility among students, they were asked to rate each item on a seven-point Likert scale ranging from Strongly disagree to Strongly agree.To obtain descriptive measures, the authors performed frequency counts and percentages.To examine the influence of students' gender on their preference and usage of Wikipedia, separate Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis nonparametric tests were performed.

Results
This survey had 336 respondents in total.Amidst them, 227 were males and 109 were females.The largest group of participants had bachelor's degree 301, followed by those with postgraduate degree 35.The respondents' demographic profile is show in Table 1.  1, the frequency and percentage of participants' Wikipedia use in their academic work was measured.The highest number of participants reported that they sometimes use Wikipedia in their academic work.But there is a few respondents said that they never use Wikipedia in their academic work.The frequency and percentage of participants' opinion on whether the consideration of Wikipedia is correct in the context of University studies was also measured.The highest number of participants 296 (88.1%) reported in the affirmative, while only 40 (11.9%)participants stated that they thought Wikipedia was not appropriate in the context of University studies.The highest number of participants 200 (59.5%) reported that they were satisfied with Wikipedia, while 98 (29.2%) respondents were neutral in their opinions.25 (7.4%) students admitted to being very satisfied, while 11 (3.3%) students stated that they were dissatisfied with Wikipedia as an academic resource.But 2 (0.6) respondents said that they were very dissatisfied with Wikipedia as an academic resource Respondents were asked in what stage of their assignment/classwork they turned to Wikipedia.The result is show in Table 2. Base on Table 2 more than half of the respondents 175 (52.1%) said that they use Wikipedia to get a preliminary idea of their assignment.81 (24.1%) participants reported that they use Wikipedia to find the current data on that specific topic, while 71 (21.1%) respondents reported that they used Wikipedia to make up for the lack of material in traditional resources.Only 9 (2.7%) participants admitted to relying on Wikipedia to find citations for their work.
Using a five-point Likert scale, the study evaluated the frequency and percentage of respondents' confidence about their ability to search an unknown topic in Wikipedia documents was also measured.The result of measured is show in Table 3. Base on Table 3, almost half of the respondents 164 (48.5%) stated that they were confident about their ability to search an unknown topic in Wikipedia.But 78(23.2%)participants admitted to being not very confident, Again 38(11.3%)students admitted to being not sure, Some (23 ,6.8%) admitted to being not at all confident, while 33 (9.8%) participants said they felt very confident in identifying bias in Wikipedia documents.A seven-point Likert scale was used to measure the frequency and percentage of participants' agreement on factors like Overall information in Wikipedia is verifiable elsewhere.The result is show in Table 4.

Table 4. Credibility of Wikipedia Among Student
Base on Table 4, overall Wikipedia articles include major facts about the topic and Overall Wikipedia articles are trustworthy.Then Kruskal-Wallis test was applied to determine the connection between various factors and users' frequency of Wikipedia use in their academic work.In agreement with the test, Wikipedia's appearance on first pages during search results has a significant impact on how regularly users use Wikipedia in their academic work (p=.408).There is also a relationship between a plethora of information being available in Wikipedia and users' regularity in using Wikipedia for their academic work (p=.149).A connection can also be established between students' frequency of Wikipedia use in their academic work and their perception of Wikipedia as a way of getting background Then data is process with Mann Whitney U test for measuring the role of gender in using Wikipedia.The result found significant differences between gender and Wikipedia's dynamic nature, significant differences between gender and Wikipedia providing information about a plethora of subjects were found.There are significant differences between gender and university students' belief that Wikipedia is appropriate for them.It was also found significant differences between gender and the appearance of Wikipedia in the first page of search results exist.The full result is show in Table 6.

Discussion
Academic librarians have been able to supply users with an ever-expanding range of capabilities and depth of high-quality data thanks to the growing adoption of electronic formats for information resources.Some professors have taken on the role of author by generating and revising sections in their disciplines, additionally allotting students to deal with Wikipedia pages (Chao & Lo, 2011;Soules, 2015).Developing digital competencies, in particular Data Literacy, Communication and Alliance capacities, Electronic Content Design, and intrinsic drive to study, are among the most intriguing.From this final perspective, students have announced a serious level of inspiration in various literary investigations, both to finish the task and to learn more about the themes in question.They also appreciate the effort significantly more than some other composed exercise or task since they see themselves as not only Wikipedia clients, but also top notch data suppliers, knowing that the encyclopedia pages are public and might be viewed by thousands of people.This understanding may be extremely powerful for learning processes that are based on innate drive (Jemielniak & Aibar, 2016;Rafaeli, , S., & Ariel, 2008).
Wikipedia's key distinguishing feature, its open nature, has boosted its popularity while also raising suspicions about its legitimacy as a source of perspective asset.Since anybody might compose or alter a Wikipedia page, the site's main analysis is on its authority and impartiality of the data's sources and creators.Previous study examined Wikipedia using Bill Katz's reference source evaluation standards and confirmed that to make the site a trustworthy reference source, they actually have quite far to go (Wallace & Van Fleet, 2005).While some believe that Wikipedia is more accurate than other encyclopedias, others have raised concerns about its use in the academic curriculum.Multiple research looked into how people assess the reliability of internet information (Giles, 2005).The phrases "validity," "faith," and "authority" were regularly used in the indicated examinations.The three thoughts of authority, validity, and faith are all multi-faceted, convoluted, and acknowledged in an unexpected way (Kelton et al., 2008;Okoli et al., 2014).The level of trust in Wikipedia and different reference books, for example, Britannica has been explored.Britannica articles were deemed more credible than those of Wikipedia (Flanagin & Metzger, 2011;Kubiszewski et al., 2011).These analyses uncover that it isn't owing to the articles' characteristic quality.The source's notoriety impacted the clients.Britannica take advantage of its extensive history of credit and acknowledgment from academic organizations, whereas Wikipedia's advancement philosophy is considered to be less ameliorating.These benefits include its position as a showcase for student authors to the wider public as state by previous study (Purdy, 2009).Wikipedia editing assignments used to be mostly reserved for professors who operate in the realms of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), but lately, the extent of these initiatives has grown to encompass social sciences and humanities.According to previous study a 2016 Australian survey, 87.5 percent of students used Wikipedia on a regular basis as a part of their university education, as well as their perceptions of its value improved as their degree of education increased (LaFrance & Calhoun, 2012).Information Literacy, decisive reasoning, media education, cooperation, online correspondence, composing, and basic advanced proficiency abilities are all encouraged through this active and collaborative instructional approach (Barry & Schamber, 1998;Calkins & Kelley, 2009;Maglaughlin & Sonnenwald, 2002).
This study is the first of its kind to look at the frequency with which university students employ Wikipedia and if they find this approach helpful.The implication of this study provide overview related to students' perceptions of Wikipedia's legitimacy based on the context of the issue and the findings of prior study, which emphasized Wikipedia's rise as a vital component in higher education.The analysis also provides circumstantial evidence for instructors' perceptions of Wikipedia as a scholarly data resource.The authors of this study believe that it will serve as a foundation for further inquiry into how Wikipedia is used in academic settings and how it impacts learning.

CONCLUSION
Open article approach of Wikipedia and it's far and wide use on university grounds, habitually instead of rigorous study.Several examinations show that Wikipedia has acquired prevalence as a scholarly asset.Students, teachers, scientists are utilizing Wikipedia generally.Wikipedia is by and large utilized for getting data on familiar subjects and not so much for new and intriguing issues.At the university levels, it is intriguing to take note of the differentiation between a higher recurrence of purpose of Wikipedia and a low pace of reference of this source.The positive encounters youngsters amass while involving themselves in Wikipedia have not yet raised it to social acknowledgment in the instructive circle.According to this viewpoint, the cooperative reference book has not, yet, arrived at the degree of information establishment.

Table 1 .
The Respondents' Demographic Profile

Table 2 .
Stage of Using Wikipedia

Table 3 .
Confidence in Wikipedia

Table 5 .
But no such relationship can be found between students' regularity in Wikipedia use and factors like Wikipedia's dynamic nature (p=.043),Wikipedia's suitability for university students (p=.000), the majority of teachers approving students' use of Wikipedia for academic assignments (p=.042), teachers' consideration of Wikipedia to be a reliable source of knowledge (p=.020) and authenticity of overall Wikipedia content (p=.050).A remarkable influence of Wikipedia being a reputable source of information can be found on how often students use Wikipedia in their academic work (p=.411).The full result is show in Table5.Kruskal Wallis Test on Preference of Using Wikipedia

Table 6 .
Mann Whitney U Test