Finding News Citations for Wikipedia

Abstract

An important editing policy in Wikipedia is to provide citations for added statements in Wikipedia pages, where statements can be arbitrary pieces of text, ranging from a sentence to a paragraph. In many cases citations are either outdated or missing altogether. In this work we address the problem of finding and updating news citations for statements in entity pages. We propose a two-stage supervised approach for this problem. In the first step, we construct a classifier to find out whether statements need a news citation or other kinds of citations (web, book, journal, etc.). In the second step, we develop a news citation algorithm for Wikipedia statements, which recommends appropriate citations from a given news collection. Apart from IR techniques that use the statement to query the news collection, we also formalize three properties of an appropriate citation, namely: (i) the citation should entail the Wikipedia statement, (ii) the statement should be central to the citation, and (iii) the citation should be from an authoritative source. We perform an extensive evaluation of both steps, using 20 million articles from a real-world news collection. Our results are quite promising, and show that we can perform this task with high precision and at scale

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia

“…Automated or semi-automated tools [17,39,44] can help improve user experience [29,69], content variety [42,67], and quality [1,20,28]. The reliability of Wikipedia can also be improved automatically, e.g., by finding potential citations [15] and Wikipedia statements in need of evidence [48]. The insights from our work can help improve Wikipedia via new citations with which users would be more likely to interact.…”

Citation Needed: A Taxonomy and Algorithmic Assessment of Wikipedia's Verifiability

“…Our work explores similar problems in the different domain of Wikipedia articles: while scholarly literature cites work for different purposes [1] to support original research, the aim of Wikipedia's citations is to verify existing knowledge. Previous work on the task of source recommendation in Wikipedia has focused on cases where statements are marked with a citation needed tag [14][15][16]44]. Sauper et al [14,44] focused on adding missing information in Wikipedia articles from external sources like news, where the corresponding Wikipedia entity is a salient concept.…”

“…Sauper et al [14,44] focused on adding missing information in Wikipedia articles from external sources like news, where the corresponding Wikipedia entity is a salient concept. In another study [16], Fetahu et al used existing statements that have either an outdated citation or citation needed tag to query for relevant citations in a news corpus. Finally, the authors in [15], attempted to determine the citation span-that is, which parts of the paragraph are covered by the citation-for any given existing citation in a Wikipedia article and the corresponding paragraph in which it is cited.…”

Provenance Information in a Collaborative Knowledge Graph: An Evaluation of Wikidata External References

“…DeFacto [16] uses machine learning and NLP to produce scores about the likelihood of a web page to contain specific pieces of information and about its trustworthiness. Fetahu et al also apply machine learning to assess web pages and find sources that are authoritative and relevant for statements within Wikipedia articles [8]. Other methods focus on evaluating provenance through similarity and distance metrics computed across different databases [5].…”

“…These models did not apply to Wikidata as this quantitative approach differs from the focus on principles such as type, author, and publisher that Wikidata follows. Furthermore, Wikidata external sources have diverse formats including web pages, PDFs, or csv files, which may be problematic to evaluate for completely automated systems such as [8] or [16]. DeFacto's measure of trustworthiness would need extensive testing in order to understand how it matches the definition of authoritativeness used by Wikidata.…”