Improving Trust in Information Sources: Serbian Wikipedia Use Case

Abstract

For almost two decades, Wikimedia Serbia has active collaboration with educational institutions in Serbia, promoting Wikipedia to young people, training and encouraging them to create and edit Wikipedia with special focus on Wikipedia trust concepts as the important factor of every information source. This paper presents our findings on the current level of students’ understanding of trust mechanisms in information sources and examines the impact of conducted targeted educational intervention on this domain. This study was conducted as part of the collaboration between Wikimedia Serbia, the Faculty of Computer Science and Informatics at Union Nikola Tesla University, and Šabac Grammar School. We used structured questionnaires to determine the initial state of trust mechanisms awareness in students. After analyzing the obtained results, we organized instructional session which included comprehensive lectures on Wikipedia, its structure, rules and its editing process. Afterwords, students selected Wikipedia-related assignments aligned with their course interests. The follow-up questionnaire revealed great improvement in correct referencing and licensing usage, in both educational institutions emphasizing the importance of proper referencing and licensing as trust mechanism and its influence in digital literacy in general.