1. Introduction
In the following, I will report the results of a study on secondary school teachers' usage of Wikipedia and their attitude to this internet encyclopedia whose content is created by its users.The result is based on questionnaire answers from 266 teachers working at upper secondaryschools in the greater Stockholm area. The survey was conducted during the autumn and winter2008/2009.The survey is thematically related to a previous study -
Wikipedia's faults and shortcomings - aconcern for libraries? (2008)
This previous work also included a user study, then the intervieweeswere high school pupils. Both studies have been carried out on the behalf of Stockholm countylibrary.The initial study included a general discussion on Wikipedia and libraries' relationship to it. A yearago one objective was to present a material that introduced Wikipedia to the Swedish librarycommunity. Over the past year, several books specializing on Wikipedia have been published: tomention a few: Lennart Guldbrandsson's book in Swedish,
Så fungerar Wikipedia
[How Wikipediaworks] (2008) and
How Wikipedia works and how you can be a part of it
by Phoebe Ayers (et al.)(2008) New titles in the same genre pop up continually. Andrew Lih's book
The WikipediaRevolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia
(2009) is awaitedwith great interest, also outside the Wikipedian circle. These three are all informative referencebooks. Unlike them, this report is limited to experiences from 266 teachers and how they perceivethe Swedish language version of Wikipedia.Why is it valuable to find out how secondary school teachers use Wikipedia and what they think of theuser-produced encyclopedia? My interest was awakened while interviewing pupils in theprevious study, when 98 percent of them claimed having used Wikipedia, and 87 percent haddone so at least once within the last thirty days. The interest to discuss high school pupils usage of Wikipedia proved great, when I, at various conferences have lectured on this topic, usually with amajority of school librarians in the audience. This eagerness, though, has often beenovershadowed by the interest to the debate teacher's relationship to Wikipedia. I dare say, thatteachers generally are believed to relate somewhat strict to Wikipedia, supposed to warn pupilsfrom using this encyclopedia within an educational context. A rather widespread opinion, is thatteachers would use grade-related sanctions in case pupils rely on Wikipedia texts to much. In theprevious study, 65 percent of the high school pupils answered "not reliable" or "not reliable at all"when asked "How reliable do you think your teachers think that the Swedish version of Wikipediais?"Wikipedia arouses emotions at school. It seems to be a story of either love or hate. There aremany opinions, but there seems to be an absence of hard facts. Thinking wishfully, I hope thisfield will be a subject to extensive scientific scrutiny. There are interesting ongoing initiatives, likethe EXACT project, which is shared between the University College of Borås and the University of Gothenburg.
Given that more initiatives will occur in the future, the reader is kindly asked toconsider this study as an initial mapping of the area, a first attempt of documentation.
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