Survey: College students love Wikipedia (profs not so happy)

Powerset has always suspected that college students love Powerset because it's such a great way to search and browse Wikipedia content.  However, the only evidence we had was from Powerset parents and glowing feedback e-mails from .edu domains. 

Last week, we conducted a study of 200 college students through Peanut Labs, which confirmed our suspicion: college students are huge fans of Wikipedia.  Here are some of the highlights of the study.

• Though 90% of students have used Wikipedia to complete an assignment, a surprising 73% of students have been explicitly told by their professor not to use Wikipedia.
• Also, about a quarter of students always use Wikipedia when they're completing an assignment.
• Not surprisingly, the most common use for Wikipedia is initial research.  However, about half of the respondents said that they use Wikipedia as a link to secondary sources of information.  That suggests that the reference section at the bottom of a Wikipedia article is an extremely valuable starting point for many topics.  Also, a third of students say that they've used Wikipedia as a primary research source.
• Students find Wikipedia very valuable.  28% of students thought that Wikipedia was a very valuable resource, 49% thought that Wikipedia was relatively important, and 23% thought that Wikipedia was only marginally helpful.

If you have any questions about the survey or you’d like to talk to someone at Powerset about why it’s better to read Wikipedia on Powerset, drop us a note at press@powerset.com.