Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia

By Tiziano Piccardi, Miriam Redi, Giovanni Colavizza, Robert West. 2020

49 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the Web and a common source of information for many users. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia was not conceived as a source of original information, but as a gateway to secondary sources: according to Wikipedia’s guidelines, facts must be backed up by reliable sources that reflect the full spectrum of views on the topic. Although citations lie at the heart of Wikipedia, little is known about how users interact with them. To close this gap, we built client-side instrumentation for logging all interactions with links leading from English Wikipedia articles to cited references during one month, and conducted the first analysis of readers’ interactions with citations. We find that overall engagement with citations is low: about one in 300 page views results in a reference click (0.29% overall; 0.56% on desktop; 0.13% on mobile). Matched observational studies of the factors associated with reference clicking reveal that clicks occur more frequently on shorter pages and on pages of lower quality, suggesting that references are consulted more commonly when Wikipedia itself does not contain the information sought by the user. Moreover, we observe that recent content, open access sources, and references about life events (births, deaths, marriages, etc.) are particularly popular. Taken together, our findings deepen our understanding of Wikipedia’s role in a global information economy where reliability is ever less certain, and source attribution ever more vital.

Subfields: Communication, Computer Science Applications, Information Retrieval & Search

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Citations in the corpus

Improving Wikipedia verifiability with AI (2022, background): “Several studies have also been conducted on user interactions with citations (Piccardi et al., 2020; Lewoniewski et al., 2020; Piccardi et al., 2021; Kaffee & Elsahar, 2021; Zagorova et al., 2022) that are tangential to our work.”
On the Value of Wikipedia as a Gateway to the Web (2021, methodology): “In order to analyze user engagement with Wikipedia’s external links, we made use of the dataset collected by Piccardi et al. [24].”
“I updated the ”: The evolution of references in the English Wikipedia and the implications for altmetrics (2020, background): “…seem to indicate that a large number of users do not fully engage with references by visiting links or retrieving the referenced document otherwise (Piccardi, Redi et al., 2020), references still make statements more credible simply by appearing alongside them; and they are actively being…”
Citation Detective : a Public Dataset to Improve and Quantify Wikipedia Citation Quality at Scale (2020, background): “However, recent studies estimate that many articles might still have a small number of references or no references at all, and that readers rarely verify statements by clicking on inline citations [5, 6].”