User:Bluerasberry/Citations in Wikipedia

Citations in Wikipedia are the





Citation needed

Wikipedia's editing guidelines place great importance on the necessity of matching facts to citations.

Wikipedia's guidelines direct editors to identify sources which present the diversity of thought on a subject and to cite those sources in developing the encyclopedia.

A 2020 study found that for about every 300 pageviews on English Wikipedia, there will be one click through of a citation. Users tend to click citations more on short articles of lower quality. A probable explanation for this is that users seek more information through Wikipedia citations when they fail to find the information they want in the Wikipedia article.

Among cited sources in Wikipedia, the most popular ones which users click are for open access sources, for recent events, and life events such as marriages or deaths in biographies.

A 2007 paper described contemporary popular criticism of Wikipedia which claimed its lack of reliability. That paper reported that Wikipedia's publishing structure enables analysis on what sorts of sources editors cite for various categories of articles. The paper also found evidence of Wikipedia editors citing appropriate high quality sources.

A 2013 study found that Wikipedia editors cite the publications of nonprofit and government agencies with higher frequency than is common in academic publication.

Various research projects imagine the text mining of sources for facts, matching those facts with citations, then staging this knowledge for integration into Wikipedia.

A 2013 study considered Wikipedia's "cite journal" template as a way to group and analyze the entirety of academic journal citations in Wikipedia. Among other findings, the paper noted that in 2007 English Wikipedia had 74,000 citations to journals whereas in 2008 it had 224,000. The large increase was due to increased availability of automated tools to bring citations and facts into Wikipedia.

A 2016 study considered the age of academic astronomy papers which Wikipedia cites. The study claimed that in astronomy, there are established facts in older papers which are still good information, but that Wikipedia editors tend to cite papers published after 2008.

A 2017 study considered how often Wikipedia cites academic papers in the field of library and information science. This study found that Wikipedia contains few citations to contemporary research in this field. When Wikipedia does include citations to publications, they tend to be open access. Also, when citations appear in Wikipedia, they may be part of a bibliography in a biography rather than used as references for the actual topic of the paper.

A 2017 considered the extent to which having papers cited in Wikipedia is an indication of high value of a paper. The study found that over all scholarly fields Wikipedia only cites about 1 in 20 published papers and about 1 in 3 monographs. The conclusion was that Wikipedia does not cite enough papers to be an indicator meriting general consideration.