One Easy Way to Make Wikipedia Better - The Atlantic

" ... Wikipedia isn’t perfect. Accuracy can be dicey in a digital environment where anyone can write and edit articles. Plenty of academic studies have concluded as much. But research also shows us that Wikipedia is pretty darn good—in some cases comparable to the quality of Encyclopaedia Britannica and its peers. Wikipedia’s robust policy on citations means that anyone with enough time on their hands could, theoretically, vet any given page for accuracy fairly easily. Enough time—and also proper access to obscure texts, academic journals, paywalled newspapers, and any other hard-to-reach sources that frequently show up in Wikipedia citations ... It turns out it’s pretty difficult to fully access key sources on any given Wikipedia page. That’s according to a study from researchers at Dartmouth’s Neukom Institute who assessed the 5,000 most-trafficked Wikipedia pages, analyzing them for verifiability. In other words, they didn’t check to see if Wikipedia pages were accurate; they investigated how easily someone could make that determination for themselves ... Based on the presence of markers like International Standard Book Number and Digital Object Identifiers, which are unique serial codes assigned to books and papers, about 80 percent of book citations and nearly 90 percent of journal references were technically verifiable—meaning you could track down the source material if you wanted to figure out whether a characterization on Wikipedia was right. But practical verifiability was a different story. It might be possible to track down the source material—as in, that source material actually exists and the link to get you there is working—but it might be really difficult or impossible to get to it. Using Google’s API, the researchers wrote a program to classify the accessibility of Google Books citations, for instance, and found that most books (71 percent) cited on Wikipedia are only partially viewable online; while many others (17 percent) are not viewable online at all. (About 12 percent were fully viewable.) ... Evans and his colleagues have an idea for how Wikipedia could begin to do this—and it’s a proposal that, if executed well, could dramatically improve access to information on the Internet. 'You could just give some kind of meter about verifiability, actually on the Wikipedia page,' said Dan Rockmore, the director of the Neukom Institute and a co-author of the study. 'That could be automated in a fairly simple way' ..."