How up-to-date are Online Tourism Communities? An Empirical Evaluation of Commercial and Non-commercial Information Quality

While social and economic aspects of online communities have been investigated broadly, the information exchanged has seldom been the subject of study. The article follows recent work on using an information systems metaphor for online communities: users specify queries and receive information from the online community members. In order to justify this metaphor, information needs to be at least up to classic information products. In this paper we present a framework for the evaluation of timeliness in online communities. An empirical study is presented which compares aspects of timeliness, namely up-to-dateness, for a wiki community and a printed guidebook. Results show that the community is at least as up-to-date as the printed guidebook. While further research is needed, results indicate that online communities can be used as information systems with reasonable information quality values