Energia Renovable, Antibiotic Resistance, Preschool Education, Egypt). For the most part, such disagreement concerned issues of emphasis and style rather than accuracy or perhaps in a small number of cases also reflected negative perspectives on online encyclopaedias in general. This raises questions that are not possible to resolve here, but which might need clarifying before further work of this kind is carried out. These concern philosophical and epistemological perspectives on issues such as: the nature of knowledge within different cultural settings, the traditional role of encyclopaedias as sources of authoritative knowledge, perspectives on the Internet in general (and Wikipedia in particular) as a medium for the co-construction and sharing of knowledge, and so on. It is a mistake, perhaps, to assume that everyone involved in a project of this kind is actually agreed on the fundamental perspectives, which are bound to influence judgments made about individual articles.
Finally, given the successful outcome in terms of return of reviews, we believe that the tool created for this pilot study, using Moodle, proved to be usable, and provides a good basis for further development. Indeed, we can say with some confidence that the decisions made for carrying out this pilot proved generally to be appropriate and effective, both in terms of securing the valuable co-operation of many busy academics within quite a tight timescale, and in terms of generating an illuminating and satisfactory dataset. We recognise that were the study to be substantially extended, some of the challenges in securing the necessary content for analysis and the desired range of reviewers might prove hard to surmount on a far larger scale.
6.2 Findings
The quantitative and qualitative findings from this project are more or less in agreement with one another, as might be expected. But they do lead to slightly differing perspectives on the judgments made by reviewers in one or two respects. While it is inevitable that quantitative results offer a more precise account of reviewers' judgments, we would suggest that the qualitative perspectives provided by the data are also of considerable value.
6.2.1 Quantitative Findings
The quantitative findings demonstrate that, across the piece, Wikipedia articles scored more highly on accuracy, amount and quality of references, style/ readability and overall judgment (which is to say, citability). With respect to citability, though, it must be emphasised that at no time did articles from online encyclopaedias, whether Wikipedia or others, score highly with respect to this key criterion. This was also made quite clear in the qualitative comments. While many reviewers felt that some of the online encyclopaedia articles they reviewed were suitable for use in non-academic contexts (as useful or interesting overviews and introductions on particular topics) they did not consider that such articles could be considered on equal terms to material in refereed journals or textbooks from established publishers. Indeed, for academic reviewers in general, this was not likely to be otherwise and should not be seen either as a particularly surprising outcome, or as a particularly negative reflection on such articles.
This simply reflects the reality that scholarly knowledge and scientific research have to go to far greater lengths than are possible within a relatively short encyclopaedia article in order
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