This study discusses how the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, which adopts an open source model, affects its readers¡¦ trust and related behaviors. The open editing format that every internet users can be an editor on the Wikipeidia arouse contiguous criticism for the knowledge accuracy and authority. The purpose of this research is to study the attitudes and usage intention of general Internet users for an online encyclopedia such as Wikipedia. We integrate trust, technology acceptance model (TAM), and content rating as the theory framework. It is of interest to approach why people would adopt Wikipedia as a knowledge resource and how they trust in it. In addition, we add the content rating as a moderator in the research model in order to verify whether the rating system on the Wikipedia would enhance trust or usage intention for readers.
This study proposes a quasi-experiment with college students as the subjects. Those students have to complete a task before they answer a questionnaire that is to reflect their attitudes and usage intention for the Wikipedia. After the statistic analysis and research discussion, we are able to verify the proposed theory framework and provide the interpretation for the results. The results show that there are relationships between trust and TAM. Among the constructs, the Perceved Usefulness has more direct influence toward use intention. This appears people would consider the Perceved Usefulness for first important element judging for adopting Wikipedia or not. The content rating of Wikipedia would effectively moderate the relatonships between trust and use intention. When the content rating situation exists, readers of Wikipedia would increase their intention through trust of Wikipedia.
For the managerial implication, the research findings can provide a reason why internet users trust the web site and how they will use it. The web site designers or operators should emphasize on enhancing features that would improve its accountability and credibility.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0827107-205810 |
| Date | 27 August 2007 |
| Creators | Huang, Hsin-cheng |
| Contributors | Fen-Hui Lin, Te-Min Chang, Sean Chen |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | Cholon |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0827107-205810 |
| Rights | not_available, Copyright information available at source archive |
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