WikiSignals.org: Helping editors evaluate reference reliability
Wikipedia's core mission is to be a source of credible information. This requires maintaining the credibility of not only internal articles but also external references. The community has spent 25 years figuring out what is/isn’t a reliable source, and has developed several resources to share this knowledge. One is the Perennial Sources list that ranks sources by their reliability. However, this list lacks machine-readability, is only available for a handful of languages, and has little knowledge sharing between different language projects. English Wikipedia is the most developed and even that ranks only a few hundred websites (out of countless millions).
WikiSignals aims to close these gaps. Participants in the WikiCred initiative are developing the WikiSignals.org website to provide reliability-related signals for sources being considered for citations, references, and external-link lists. It returns domain data and credibility indicators for over 70,000 websites, including global traffic rank, registration date, and reliability assessments from sources inside and outside Wikipedia — information useful for judging the domain-level source credibility. Our goals are to:
1. Help readers and editors make decisions about the credibility of online web-based sources at scale (such as for editing articles or for community discussions on general source reliability).
2. Provide a single, centralized source of data in a machine-readable format for developers in Wiki projects such as Wikidata and LiftWing.
The project was initiated at WikiCredCon 2025. Partners include SimPPL, Iffy.news, Veri.FYI, AfroCROWD, Factiverse, Internet Archive, CUFinder, and WebAIM.
