Wikipedia does not have to be truthful, but it is important that the information must be confirmed by reliable sources. Therefore quality of the articles also depends on the availability of references. By following the links in such references (footnotes), readers can check facts or find more information on a topic described. Recent studies based showed that there are over 1 million online sources of information in Wikipedia. Based on the analysis of over 40 million articles from the 55 most developed language versions of Wikipedia it is possible to extract information about over 200 million references. One of the works presents various models for automatic assessment of popularity and reliability of sources in each language version of Wikipedia. Results of assessment of over 1 million sources (websites and publications) are available on the BestRef.
You can use also special extension to instantly assess references in Wikipedia article, or you can go to separate page with reliability report on selected article. You can also assess the source when you are on different URL address – just click on the BestRef button in Chrome.
To find the most popular and reliable sources we used information about over 200 million references of Wikipedia articles. More details in the research.
Browser extension is available on Chrome Web Store.
Bibliography
- Lewoniewski W., Węcel K., Abramowicz W. (2020). Modeling Popularity and Reliability of Sources in Multilingual Wikipedias, Information 2020, 11(5), 263. DOI: 10.3390/info11050263
- Research on information quality and reliability of sources in Wikipedia