Collected a total of 96 million Wikipedia citations for October 2018 and April 2019 to analyze reader interaction trends for different types of references

1. Overall engagement with Wikipedia citations is low: about 0.29%, or 1 in 300 page views, results in a reference click

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Readers are more likely to interact with citations in shorter and lower quality Wikipedia articles because readers are more likely to seek additional sources when Wikipedia articles do not provide them with the information they are looking for. Similarly, Wikipedia articles that have more references and citations are considered higher quality. Hence readers are not as compelled to click on sources cited in search of more details when they are satisfied with what Wikipedia tells them.

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia

Piccardi, T., Redi, M., Colavizza, G., & West, R. (2020, April). Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia. In Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020 (pp. 2365-2376). https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3366423.3380300?casa_token=cxMCuRb6gI4AAAAA%3AWfvR1XmYGSEd8lVIzci90Cyu3txN3b4Z0pt1NzKKr9vcAdSgXwO3tA8U9XChzc3eiDuPVx23Ndg48g

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