“Wikipedia is a critical public resource, which greatly relies on scientific and media sources cited in every article. To date we know quite little about Wikipedia’s sources: what are their characteristics and how are they used in Wikipedia? A significant obstacle to a better understanding of this important aspect of Wikipedia is that researchers have no easily accessible dataset containing citations to Wikipedia’s sources….

The main goal of our Project is to create WikipediaCitations: an open dataset of citations from Wikipedia to all its sources. By contributing high-quality Wikipedia citation data that is useful in ‘altmetrics’ and a variety of third-party applications, and in researching and improving the reliability of Wikipedia’s contents, we hope to foster research on Wikipedia and the development of tools in support of Wikipedia editors. Our work will help in validating Wikipedia content, spotting where Wikipedia might be in need for an update and discovering new or more relevant sources related to Wikipedia’s contents.”