Wikipedia and fact-checking

Wikipedia's practice of flagging unsubstantiated information with "Citation needed" warnings has become almost synonymous with the need for fact checking more generally.

Wikipedia's volunteer editor community has the responsibility of fact-checking Wikipedia's content.[1] Their aim is to curb the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation by the website.

Wikipedia has been considered one of the major free open source websites, where millions can read, edit and post their views for free. Therefore Wikipedia takes the effort to provide its users with well-verified sources. Fact-checking is an aspect of the broader reliability of Wikipedia.

Various academic studies about Wikipedia and the body of criticism of Wikipedia seek to describe the limits of Wikipedia's reliability, document who and how people use Wikipedia for fact-checking, and what consequences result from this use. Wikipedia articles can have poor quality in many ways including self-contradictions.[2] Those poor articles require improvement.

Large platforms including YouTube[3] and Facebook[4] use Wikipedia's content to confirm the accuracy of the information in their own media collections.

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Timmons 2018 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Hsu, Cheng; Li, Cheng-Te; Saez-Trumper, Diego; Hsu, Yi-Zhan (2021). "WikiContradiction: Detecting Self-Contradiction Articles on Wikipedia". 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data). pp. 427–436. arXiv:2111.08543. doi:10.1109/BigData52589.2021.9671319. ISBN 978-1-6654-3902-2. S2CID 244130115.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Glaser 2018 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Flynn, Kerry (October 5, 2017). "Facebook outsources its fake news problem to Wikipedia—and an army of human moderators". Mashable.

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