Wikipedia Users in the Light of International Research – Practical Implications

Innovations, new technological solutions by means of which users have constant access to information from all over the world, are continuously influencing the way people live. A very important moment in the development of using the Internet was the appearance of the first social media. One of the first and most widely known is Wikipedia, described as the Internet encyclopaedia.

The aim of the article is to identify the ways of using Wikipedia by individual users in various foreign countries, with respect to the characteristics such as age, gender and education. The analysis of the literature has been complemented with the results of the empirical study that was conducted in several countries (China, Germany, India, Poland, Russia, Spain, the United States and Turkey). The analysis of the empirical data showed significant differentiation of the influence of the studied determinants on the ways of using the Wikipedia resources. In the majority of the studied groups gender was the most differentiating determinant.