Percepciones y uso de la Wikipedia en alumnos de educación secundaria

Abstract

Wikipedia is an increasingly used resource in learning processes, even though students are usually just consumers. This article presents an analysis of perceptions about Wikipedia among secondary education students and the use they make of it. The study was conducted with a total number of 143 students at the end courses of compulsory secondary education (15 years old) and high school (17 years old), in a school in the Barcelona metropolitan area. The findings suggest that students value Wikipedia for its speed, ease of use and broad coverage, and accept the trade-off with perceived low reliability. The study also shows a significant difference of use by area of knowledge, with a prevalence of use in research, Humanities and Social Science subjects, and minimal in the case of Mathematics. Also, simultaneous use of different language versions of Wikipedia was revealed, mainly of the Catalan and Spanish edition and, to a lesser degree, of the English one. This article contributes to a better understanding of the use and perception of Wikipedia among secondary school students and aims at laying the foundations for the design of educational interventions centered in the development of digital competences using editing Wikipedia.