Wikipedia plays a crucial role in the integrity of the Web. This work analyzes the reliability of this global encyclopedia through the lens of its references. We operationalize the notion of reference quality by defining reference need (RN), i.e., the percentage of sentences missing a citation, and reference risk (RR), i.e., the proportion of non-authoritative references. We release Citation Detective, a tool for automatically calculating the RN score, and discover that the RN score has dropped by 20 percent point in the last decade, with more than half of verifiable statements now accompanying references. The RR score has remained below 1% over the years as a result of the efforts of the community to eliminate unreliable references. We propose pairing novice and experienced editors on the same Wikipedia article as a strategy to enhance reference quality. Our quasi-experiment indicates that such a co-editing experience can result in a lasting advantage in identifying unreliable sources in future edits. As Wikipedia is frequently used as the ground truth for numerous Web applications, our findings and suggestions on its reliability can have a far-reaching impact. We discuss the possibility of other Web services adopting Wiki-style user collaboration to eliminate unreliable content.

翻译：维基百科在网络信息完整性中扮演着关键角色。本研究通过参考文献的视角分析这一全球百科全书的可靠性。我们通过定义"参考需求"(reference need, RN)——即缺乏引用的句子百分比，以及"参考风险"(reference risk, RR)——即非权威参考文献的比例，将参考质量概念付诸实践。我们发布了自动计算RN分数的工具Citation Detective，并发现过去十年间RN分数下降了20个百分点，超过半数可验证声明现已附有参考文献。由于社区致力于消除不可靠参考文献，RR分数多年来始终低于1%。我们建议在同一维基百科条目上配对新手与资深编辑作为提升参考质量的策略。准实验表明，这种协作编辑经历可使编辑者在未来编辑中长期保持识别不可靠来源的能力。鉴于维基百科常被用作众多网络应用的基准真相，我们对其可靠性的发现与建议将产生深远影响。我们探讨了其他网络服务采纳维基式用户协作模式以消除不可靠内容的可能性。