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Engineering Research Spike: Investigate "References Added" Count for Special:Impact
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Description

Objective:

Explore the feasibility of including a "References added" metric in the Growth team's Impact module on Special:Impact.

User story & summary:
  • As an experienced editor, I want the Impact module to reflect the policies and values of the wikis—specifically, that adding references is a core part of contributing high-quality content.
  • As a newcomer, I want to see how many references I’ve added to Wikipedia articles, so I can better understand that Wikipedia values verifiable accuracy and citing reliable, authoritative sources.
  • As a librarian participating in the 1Lib1Ref campaign, I want a visible count of references I’ve added in the Impact module, so I can track my contributions and share the impact of my work.
Background:

Verifiability and citing reliable sources are foundational to Wikipedia:

All articles must strive for verifiable accuracy with citations based on reliable sources

Wikipedia:Five_pillars

Among standard quality indicators, the number of references has the greatest effect—more references are associated with a lower probability of deletion. This is followed by the number of wikilinks. While longer page length also lowers deletion probability, its impact is smaller compared to references and wikilinks.

Factors Affecting Deletion of Translated Articles

Acceptance Criteria:

Event Timeline

KStoller-WMF moved this task from Inbox to Backlog on the Growth-Team board.
KStoller-WMF added a subscriber: DMburugu.

Worth mentioning that we could look into the Wikilink Tool which collects references added to an article for showing Library partners how much their resources have been cited.

Discussed in backlog refinement as a task we can timebox to ~1 day of research to determine if there are any low effort ways to add a reference added metric to the Impact API, or if this is a larger project and we should instead continue to advocate for T341649: Provide an easy way for MediaWiki to fetch aggregate data from the data lake.

KStoller-WMF lowered the priority of this task from High to Medium.May 7 2025, 4:58 PM
Urbanecm_WMF set the point value for this task to 2.May 26 2025, 4:23 PM
KStoller-WMF lowered the priority of this task from Medium to Low.May 27 2025, 4:49 PM