Abstract:

With the emergence of Web 2.0, Internet users developed from mere consumers to producers of information that is openly accessible on the internet, without prior editorial control. Popular examples for the provision of such “user-generated content” are Wikipedia and YouTube, but also contents within blogs, forums, question-and-answers sites and even social media like Facebook belong to this category. Based on an explorative interview study, this paper investigates how students perceive the quality of contents across these different informational platforms, and how they evaluate information quality when user-generated content for their academic (learning) purposes.