Submissions:2025/Does college students’ political leaning influence their use of Wikipedia in a general education civics course?
This submission has been noted and is pending review for WikiConference North America 2025.
Title:
- Does college students’ political leaning influence their use of Wikipedia in a general education civics course?
Type of session:
- Lecture (15-30 min)
Session theme(s):
- Credibility
Abstract:
Despite Wikipedia’s commitment to providing information from a neutral point of view, Wikipedia content may be perceived as having a left-leaning bias (Greenstein & Zhu, 2012; Martin, 2018; Rozado, 2024). Here we investigated whether college students’ political leanings influence their use of Wikipedia as part of a semester-long course emphasizing wise use of Wikipedia for lateral reading. Lateral reading is an online information evaluation strategy that involves investigating sources, finding better coverage, and tracing information back to its original context. Wikipedia is an ideal tool for taking bearings on unfamiliar or controversial topics given its broad coverage and neutral point of view. Use of Wikipedia figures prominently in the civic online reasoning curriculum (Digital Inquiry Group, n.d.; Wineburg et al., 2016) taught at our institution, with specific lessons demonstrating use of Wikipedia to learn more about the people and organizations posting content online. For the present study, we asked college students (N = 174) to report their use of Wikipedia both prior to and following completion of the civic online reasoning curriculum. Students’ use of Wikipedia increased from pretest to posttest, and generally fell within the range of “less than once a month” to “about once a month”. Wikipedia use varied as a function of students’ self-identified political views. Students who identified as conservatives were less likely to use Wikipedia than other students, and did not show gains in Wikipedia use after completing the lateral-reading curriculum. These findings align with other work suggesting that political bias may influence students’ preference and use of lateral reading (Nazario et al., 2024), and suggest that perceptions of bias in Wikipedia content affect students’ willingness to use Wikipedia as a tool for vetting online information.
Author name(s):
Wikimedia username(s):
- Celizas, gravelled, Brooks_patty
Affiliated organization(s):
- College of Staten Island and CUNY Graduate Center
Estimated length of session
- 30 minutes
Will you be presenting remotely?
- I will present in-person
Okay to livestream?
- Livestreaming is okay
Previously presented?
- N/A
Special requests:
- We would like to show presentation slides during the talk.