Britons Find Wikipedia More Trustworthy than News Reports

People in Britain trust Wikipedia more than traditional news outlets, a new poll shows.

Jimmy Wales, who is the popular free information site's founder, said at a conference in London that people, at least in Britain, have started putting more faith in Wikipedia than news articles.

The survey was conducted by YouGov researchers. The survey found that over half of the respondents had used Wikipedia for research and that most of them trusted the writers of the site more than news reporters.

"British people trust Wikipedia more than the news," Wales told the conference, AFP reported. "The things that's really impressive here is the BBC has an excellent reputation... and we're trusted slightly more than the BBC. That's a little scary. But it's something we have accomplished."

The online encyclopaedia is maintained by public and is often criticized for incorrect information. Still, people "turn to us for reliable, solid information.... We do a decent job of it," Wales added.

In fact, people trust the information site so much that they have even plagiarized material from Wikipedia. The survey found that one in ten people aged 40 years or under have copied content from the site without citing the source. Totally, around 5 percent of the respondents said that they had copied material from the site without citation.

The online enclycopedia, however, has lower scores on accuracy. Around 83 percent of the respondents said that they had a fair amount of trust in Encyclopædia Britannica compared to just 67 percent in Wikipedia. Only 7 percent of the respondents said that they had a "great deal of trust" in the accuracy of content on Wikipedia.