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 of the article. Examples of typical vandalism are adding irrelevant obscenities and crude humour to a page, illegitimately blanking pages and inserting obvious nonsense into a page. No instances of vandalism were detected in any of the articles for the present study, either by standardisers or reviewers.



Step 2: Standardisation Process

Article Text:

All articles selected from Wikipedia and from other popular online alternative encyclopaedias then underwent a process of standardisation to remove visible cues as to the source of the article. This included the conversion of all article text to black Arial font with specified font sizes for the title (16 Bold), Headings (14 Bold) and Sub-headings (10). All text was single spaced and aligned to the left.

Supporting Material:

Any supporting material e.g. photographs, flow-charts and plots was pasted at the end of the document section in which they appear, one after the other, in their order of appearance in the text. They were resized to 5cm x 5cm, and captions were pasted beneath the corresponding pictures in Arial font, size 10. In cases where the picture lacked a caption, one was not added.

References and Links:

References at the end of the text were maintained in a standard list format, in black Arial font (size 8). All hyperlinks from reference lists were removed and the presence of 'notes' at the end of Wikipedia entries were placed under references and formatted accordingly. All '^ abcde' were deleted from the references when they occurred.

For articles from alternative encyclopaedia choices, a heading entitled 'Additional Information (from links)' [Arial font, black, bold, size 14] was created at the bottom of the text of the primary article in the MS Word document. All articles under the assorted references sections were read through to confirm they are not covered in the text of the primary articles. Articles whose topics were not included in the primary articles were pasted 23