Papers › Longitudinal Assessment of Reference Quality on Wikipedia
Longitudinal Assessment of Reference Quality on Wikipedia
Aitolkyn Baigutanova, Jaehyeon Myung, Diego Saez-Trumper, Ai-Jou Chou, Miriam Redi, Changwook Jung, Meeyoung Cha
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Wikipedia plays a crucial role in the integrity of the Web. This work analyzes the reliability of this global encyclopedia through the lens of its references. We operationalize the notion of reference quality by defining reference need (RN), i.e., the percentage of sentences missing a citation, and reference risk (RR), i.e., the proportion of non-authoritative references. We release Citation Detective, a tool for automatically calculating the RN score, and discover that the RN score has dropped by 20 percent point in the last decade, with more than half of verifiable statements now accompanying references. The RR score has remained below 1% over the years as a result of the efforts of the community to eliminate unreliable references. We propose pairing novice and experienced editors on the same Wikipedia article as a strategy to enhance reference quality. Our quasi-experiment indicates that such a co-editing experience can result in a lasting advantage in identifying unreliable sources in future edits. As Wikipedia is frequently used as the ground truth for numerous Web applications, our findings and suggestions on its reliability can have a far-reaching impact. We discuss the possibility of other Web services adopting Wiki-style user collaboration to eliminate unreliable content.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections