Can machine learning uncover Wikipedia’s missing “citation needed” tags?
One of the key mechanisms that allows Wikipedia to maintain its high quality is the use of inline citations. Through citations, readers and editors make sure that information in an article accurately reflects its source. As Wikipedia’s verifiability policy mandates, “material challenged or likely to be challenged, and all quotations, must be attributed to a….
Research directions towards the Wikimedia 2030 strategy
The Wikimedia Foundation’s Research team has published a set of white papers that outline our plans and priorities for the next 5 years. These white papers, which were developed collaboratively by all members of the team, reflect our thinking about the kind of research that will be necessary to further the 2030 Wikimedia strategic direction….
How many Wikipedia references are available to read? We measured the proportion of open access sources across languages and topics.
Let’s say you’re planning a trip to a subtropical region and you want to learn about available vaccines for yellow fever. You look up the English Wikipedia article. You’re lucky to find a well-sourced section, with a wealth of references, many of them pointing to information from public health agencies and reputable news articles. Great!….
‘Conversations gone awry’—the researchers figuring out when online conversations get out of hand
Did you know that humans make the right guess about 72% of the time, and that indicates that they have an intuition for this task, while also highlighting that the task is far from trivial?
The Initiative for Open Citations celebrates its first birthday
In celebration, and to mark the progress made, we've designated this month as Open Citations Month.
New monthly dataset shows where people fall into Wikipedia rabbit holes
The Wikimedia Foundation’s Analytics team is releasing a monthly clickstream dataset. The dataset represents—in aggregate—how readers reach a Wikipedia article and navigate to the next. Previously published as a static release, this dataset is now available as a series of monthly data dumps for English, Russian, German, Spanish, and Japanese Wikipedias.
How we know what we know: The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) helps unlock millions of connections between scholarly research
Citations are the backbone of scholarly knowledge. They help researchers verify information, build on the existing knowledge we already know, and generate opportunity for new discoveries. Citations are not only relevant to academia. They are the foundation for how we know what we know. Until recently, the idea of creating a freely accessible repository of open….
Artificial intelligence service “ORES” gives Wikipedians X-ray specs to see through bad edits
When anyone can edit any page of one of the biggest websites in the world, how can you evaluate all those changes? A Wikimedia Foundation research scientist and a team of volunteers has developed an artificial intelligence service to handle some of the highest-volume crowdsourcing issues on the internet.
Seven years after Nature, pilot study compares Wikipedia favorably to other encyclopedias in three languages
Improving the quality of articles has long been one of the primary aims of contributors to Wikipedia, and is one of the Wikimedia movement’s 2010-15 strategic priorities, but measuring it objectively has remained a challenge