This is a meta-task to cover the work involved with equipping volunteers, across experience levels, with the information and tools they need to decide how reliable other volunteers are likely to consider source(s) they:
- Are attempting to add to Wikipedia
- Encounter while reading/patrolling Wikipedia
Risks/open questions
- 1. How might we treat domains that have low survivability scores (e.g., YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia itself) and can still be valid for specific references? via @Pablo.
- For the use cases involving highlighting risky domains in existing revisions, it might be worth prioritizing recent revisions that have added a risky domain, since we may not want to flag references that were added a long time ago and have already survived several edits on the page.
- 2. How might we craft the UX in such a way that encourages people to consider reference survivability as one input – among the many volunteers need – to decide whether a given reference warrant discussion/removal/etc.? via User:Kowal2701.
Background
As noted in T265163, inexperienced editors often make edits that defy the project they are editing's policies and guidelines. One such policy we see new editors break (knowingly and unknowingly) is not citing reliable sources. [i]
This task is about equipping volunteers with the information and actions they need to decide if and how they will:
- Proceed with citing the source they are attempting/considering adding to Wikipedia
- Engage with sources that are already published on Wikipedia
Ultimately, this fits within the larger effort to help newcomers make edits they are proud of and experienced volunteers consider useful and aligned with Wikipedia's larger objectives.
Links
Models
Research
- wikidata:ProVe: A tool that provides information about the quality of the references of Wikidata items, based on techniques such as large language models, triple verbalisation, and semantic similairty
- Research:ReferenceRisk via @FNavas-foundation
- Gender and country biases in Wikipedia citations to scholarly publications via @Pablo
- WikiCite: Editing Awareness and Trust Experiments via @cmadeo
- Research:Analyzing sources on Wikipedia via @Isaac.
- Sources investigation and PoC via @FNavas-foundation
- Longitudinal Assessment of Reference Quality on Wikipedia via @Pablo
- The % of English Wikipedia sentences missing a citation has dropped by 20% in the last decade, with more than half of verifiable statements now accompanying references. The % of non-authoritative sources has remained below 1% over the years as a result of community efforts.
- Editors with more experience tend to make better changes in terms of reference quality by adding missing references and removing potentially risky sources.
- New editors who have co-edited an article with an experienced editor on the same day are more likely to avoid risky references in future edits compared to their peers who have not.
- Multilingual Wikipedia perennial source list (preprint avail. soon) via @Pablo
- Some sources deemed untrustworthy in one language continue to appear in articles across other languages.
- Non-authoritative sources found in the English version of a page tend to persist in other language versions of that page.
- Wikipedia Source Controversiality Metrics via @Pablo
- First findings suggest that statements backed with reliable sources tend to receive less edits than those with unreliable sources (case study: enwiki articles on climate change; reliability taken from the perennial sources list)
Relevant conversations
- Es.wiki
- Discussion about "Add reference" Suggested Edit about the task has to do with the suggestion not pointing people to the specific part of an article that needs a reference.
- MediaWiki
- @Sdkb writes in "So glad to see!": "... we'll absolutely want control over the source list there, so that we can modify it as RSP changes, and ideally we'll want to be able to provide context/specific conditions for (sometimes-)unreliable sources, as it's far from just a binary reliable/unreliable switch."
- English Wikipedia
- User:Alaexis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources#c-Alaexis-20260205224000-WhatamIdoing-20260205214100
- User:David_Eppstein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources#c-Alaexis-20260205224000-WhatamIdoing-20260205214100
- Easier_new_articles_suggestion_for_non-contributors
- "With this new proposed UI we could have a clear summary of the criteria for notability and eligibility on Wikipedia. The current requested articles system does not explicitly put those critera on the page, instead users need to navigate elsewhere to find them." -- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Elli](User:Elli)
- "... requested articles should require RS for example." -- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Elli](User:Elli)
- " If we do require RS, we would still need to the community to somehow vet the sources." -- User:Philipp.governale
- " We could even attach an edit filter that barred it if there weren't at least 2 URLs in it." --User:Nosebagbear
Tools
- WikiScore: a tool created to validate edits and count scores of participants in wikicontests. via @SEgt-WMF.
- CredBot via @ FNavas-foundation.
- User:Headbomb/unreliable via @Pablo
- The script breaks down external links (including DOIs) to various sources in different 'severities' of unreliability.
- See: User:Headbomb/unreliable#What_it_does.
- User:SuperHamster/CiteUnseen via @Pablo
- Adds categorical icons to Wikipedia citations, providing readers and editors a quick initial evaluation of citations at a glance
- User:Novem_Linguae/Scripts/CiteHighlighter via @Pablo
- Highlights 1800 sources green, yellow, or red depending on their reliability
- Credibility bot
Source lists
Listed at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q59821108
- French Wikipedia
- English Wikipedia