“A well-written Wikipedia page will cite scholarly publications with links to the articles in those citations that can be accessed immediately by users. At the 2019 Charleston Conference keynote, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle claimed that 6% of Wikipedia readers click on a link in the footnotes (although another study found that it was more like 0.03%). In 2016, Wikipedia was the 6th-largest referrer for DOIs, with half of referrals successfully authenticating to access the article. External links on Wikipedia produce an estimated 7 million dollars of revenue per month. Given that Wikipedia is such a popular website, it’s unsurprising that academic publishers are actively pursuing ways to promote their work on Wikipedia.
Scholarly publishers have reported increased traffic as a result of giving access to their publications to Wikipedia editors, and a controlled experiment on Wikipedia shows that they are right to value Wikipedia citations. Works cited on Wikipedia have an outsized influence on scholarly work — specifically in its literature reviews. Additionally, one research article found that open-access (OA) articles were cited more frequently than non-OA articles on Wikipedia in 2014, an idea supported by the generally increased readership of OA articles compared to paid-access articles (all of these ideas are explained in more detail below). …”