Insights on the references of Wikipedia’s featured articles in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish

NIDIA HERNANDEZ; GIMENA DEL RIO RIANDE; DIEGO DE LA HERA

Lyon

Jornada; Wikiworkshop; 2022

Wikimedia Foundation

References play an essential role for Wikipedia’s reliability. Statements must be supported by external sources allowing the reader to verify the validity of an article. However, identifying and ranking the references used in Wikipedia is not a trivial task. On the one hand, references can’t be requested through the Mediawiki’s API, so the only way to retrieve them is extracting them from the wikitext of each article. On the other hand, references can be entered either by hand or using a template.Wikipedia’s Visual Editor allows to automatically generate citations from URLs via an extension called Citoid. The citations produced by Citoid for sites which embed the metadata appropriately are correct. However, the results are often inaccurate or incomplete for non academic sites such as newspapers.Web2cit, a tool aiming to improve the results for web sources, is currently under development. In this work, we report on our first steps for automatically estimate the width and nature of this gap, both before and after the implementation of this tool, and we share some insights regarding cultural differences in editorial practices in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish Wikipedia.