I’m not very familiar with how Wikipedia vets the sources in the references/external links. I was wondering whether there are manual or automated checks for cyclic sources, for example a Wikipedia page cites a source for something, but such source after a few rounds of citing would go back to the same Wikipedia page.
- Does that happen with Wikipedia?
- Does it matter? I presume that would invalidate the source?
- How do they make sure it does not happen? Is there an automated check or something?
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lol there really is an xkcd for everything!
That actually once happened deliberately with the page https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg. It’s a German politician with a lot of names. So someone added another name to the list and after a short editing war some online publications picked it up and he was able to end the editing war by citing them as sources.
I think it stayed there for several weeks and many many journalists justs blindly copied the name from Wikipedia.
https://bildblog.de/5704/wie-ich-freiherr-von-guttenberg-zu-wilhelm-machte/
From my experience, despite all the citogenesis described in other comments here, Wikipedia citations are still better vetted than in many, many scientific papers, let alone regular journalism :/ I recall spending days following citation links in already well-cited papers to basically debunk basic statements in the field.
Can you give an example if you remember for the last point you made?
I do not have notes from that time anymore, sorry. I do recall though that after following a chain of citations I ended up at the paper in the center of this controversy. Nobody sane would cite in now except to point out its flaws, but if there’s a modern paper that cites a 10 year old paper that cites a 30 year old paper that cites it—people usually won’t notice.
Wikipedia does not check if the sources themselves cite Wikipedia. I mean they can, but they rarely do.
This has led to situations where a falsehood keeps getting added because it has a “reliable source” and editors are too lazy to question it.
