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The purpose of this paper is to explore which personal and contextual factors affect the use of Wikipedia as a teaching resource in higher education institutions.

This research question is approached by investigating faculty perceptions and attitudes in two large Spanish universities. For this purpose, a comprehensive empirical study has been employed, based on an online survey to faculty members and the inclusion of a decision-making model in the analysis.

Data provide evidence that a combination of cultural, social and subjective factors influences the decision to use Wikipedia. This decision is not only associated with lecturers’ individual characteristics, but mostly with surrounding influences. Teaching uses are more frequent when academics have close reference models and when they perceive that Wikipedia is being positively valued by their colleagues.

The present study provides a creative framework to analyze the main determining factors of Wikipedia usage by faculty. The inclusion of both internal and external factors in the decision process has proved to be a valuable novelty.

The study detects the main factors affecting the negative or reluctant attitude toward Wikipedia and provides some recommendations to overcome these barriers.

The study widens the scope of previous investigations supplying a new research framework and including, for the first time, a prominent online university in the analysis in order to discard the potential effects of digital and information illiteracy among students and faculty members.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate university faculty perceptions and practices of using Wikipedia as a teaching resource.

This study is based on a large survey to all faculty members in two large public universities. A total of 913 valid responses were collected through an online questionnaire with 9 control variables and 41 Likert-scaled questions.

The results do not support an overwhelming sceptical attitude among faculty towards Wikipedia. The overall quality of Wikipedia articles is highly valued and most faculty are regular users, just as students are. Though most faculty show a positive view on the teaching usefulness of Wikipedia, few of them actually use it for teaching purposes. A certain conflict has been detected between standard academic procedures of knowledge building and the open collaborative model on which Wikipedia rests. In the end, two important factors play a role in shaping faculty views: their colleagues’ perceived opinions and practices, and academic disciplines.

The survey has only been conducted in two universities. More institutions are needed to broaden the scope.

The authors have gathered a greater number of answers than those collected in previous studies. The questionnaire is also very extensive. The survey has been addressed to all faculty members at one online university and at one standard brick-and-mortar university.