Research talk:Characterizing Wikipedia Citation Usage/Second Round of Analysis

1 in 4 articles has no references at all?

Jeez. --Valereee (talk) 17:18, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

It seems unlikely that 24.5 percent of articles do not have a single reference. My interests are mostly obscure geographical and historical subjects, and only rarely do I find an article without footnotes. I realize that my experience is anecdotal, but I'll have to be persuaded that your finding is correct. Smallchief (talk) 19:47, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

It's worth remembering that the English Wikipedia has hundreds of thousands if not millions of articles (semi)automatically created from various databases of locations, asteroids and whatnot. Such articles, especially if created a decade ago or more, often do not have inline references, but that doesn't necessarily mean they don't have reliable sources for the (little) content they have.

Also, they don't necessarily affect the average user experience because their pageviews may be extremely low. Working with lists of articles in particular areas I see things like the bottom 50-60 % of articles attracting less than 1 % of the views. So some error which may sound catastrophically common may turn out to affect very few usages. Nemo 10:12, 13 September 2020 (UTC)

normalizing citation templates

Hi all, So happy you are doing this work. I mentioned this during the Wikimania session but - the graph on click through rate for citation templates should probably be normalized against template usage. cite techreport & cite paper are rarely used (<3000 times on en.wikipedia). Cite news, cite journal & cite web are used millions (?) of times however. And "citation" is a catch-all. best, -- phoebe | talk 10:35, 17 August 2019 (UTC)