{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/citation-needed-a-taxonomy-and-algorithmic","title":"Citation Needed: A Taxonomy and Algorithmic Assessment of Wikipedia's Verifiability","arxiv_id":"1902.11116","date":"2019-02-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Miriam Redi","Besnik Fetahu","Jonathan Morgan","Dario Taraborelli"],"abstract":"Wikipedia is playing an increasingly central role on the web,and the policies\nits contributors follow when sourcing and fact-checking content affect million\nof readers. Among these core guiding principles, verifiability policies have a\nparticularly important role. Verifiability requires that information included\nin a Wikipedia article be corroborated against reliable secondary sources.\nBecause of the manual labor needed to curate and fact-check Wikipedia at scale,\nhowever, its contents do not always evenly comply with these policies.\nCitations (i.e. reference to external sources) may not conform to verifiability\nrequirements or may be missing altogether, potentially weakening the\nreliability of specific topic areas of the free encyclopedia. In this paper, we\naim to provide an empirical characterization of the reasons why and how\nWikipedia cites external sources to comply with its own verifiability\nguidelines. First, we construct a taxonomy of reasons why inline citations are\nrequired by collecting labeled data from editors of multiple Wikipedia language\neditions. We then collect a large-scale crowdsourced dataset of Wikipedia\nsentences annotated with categories derived from this taxonomy. Finally, we\ndesign and evaluate algorithmic models to determine if a statement requires a\ncitation, and to predict the citation reason based on our taxonomy. We evaluate\nthe robustness of such models across different classes of Wikipedia articles of\nvarying quality, as well as on an additional dataset of claims annotated for\nfact-checking purposes.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1902.11116v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.11116v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"citation-needed-a-taxonomy-and-algorithmic","repo_url":"https://github.com/aikochou/citationdetective","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"articles","task_name":"Articles"},{"task_slug":"fact-checking","task_name":"Fact Checking"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1902.11116","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}