Citation Location Needed: a case for citing specific segments within sources to improve verifiability on Wikipedia
🎥 Session recording: [https://youtu.be/IKDrJJMUDW8?t=27044](https://youtu.be/IKDrJJMUDW8?t=27044)
For claims to be deemed reliable on Wikipedia, not only should they cite "reliable sources", but they should also be clearly entailed from their cited sources. Given how relatively easier it is to construct spurious or misinformed citations—an art at which LLMs excel—than to detect them, the risk they pose to the verifiability of content on Wikipedia is likely to increase in the coming years, unless mitigated.
As well as using openly accessible sources, specifying in-source location indicators (such as page numbers, etc.) or quoting targeted segments facilitates the verification of citations and lowers its cost. Although these practices are made possible through various citation template keywords and how-to guides, they remain only suggestive and sparsely applied on the collaborative encyclopedia.
This ongoing research analyses the use of in-source location parameters, in order to better understand and mitigate the risks caused by spurious citations. Following a presentation of this analysis on citations from English and French Wikipedias, this session will be used to make a case to encourage the use of in-source location parameters, and suggest ways to do so. This could mean more explicit recommendations in the guidelines and policies, changes in existing citation tools, new tools to analyse citations, or a combination of those different approaches.
