When Collaborative Maintenance Falls Short: The Persistence of Retracted Papers on Wikipedia

2025-09-22

AI Summary

This study identifies a systemic delay in English Wikipedia’s maintenance of scientific citation credibility: 71.6% of citations to retracted papers are high-risk—either added pre-retraction or unannotated post-retraction—with a median persistence time of 3.68 years. Methodologically, the authors construct the first multi-source dataset integrating Retraction Watch, Crossref, Altmetric, and OpenAlex metadata with Wikipedia revision histories (1,181 retracted citations), applying survival analysis to model correction drivers. Results reveal that human editorial attention—measured via talk-page activity—significantly accelerates citation correction, whereas paper-level academic authority (e.g., high citation count) delays it. These findings expose structural limitations in Wikipedia’s community-driven, citation-level real-time governance, highlighting critical gaps in collaborative knowledge infrastructure. The work provides empirical evidence and design implications for ensuring credible, dynamically maintained citations in large-scale open-knowledge systems.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Humans and AI: Crowd Sourcing and Human Computation
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Causality

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI

Abstract

Wikipedia serves as a key infrastructure for public access to scientific knowledge, but it faces challenges in maintaining the credibility of cited sources, especially when scientific papers are retracted. This paper investigates how citations to retracted research are handled on English Wikipedia. We construct a novel dataset that integrates Wikipedia revision histories with metadata from Retraction Watch, Crossref, Altmetric, and OpenAlex, identifying 1,181 citations of retracted papers. We find that 71.6% of all citations analyzed are problematic. These are citations added before a paper's retraction, as well as the citations introduced after retraction without any in-text mention of the paper's retracted status. Our analysis reveals that these citations persist for a median of over 3.68 years (1,344 days). Through survival analysis, we find that signals of human attention are associated with a faster correction process. Unfortunately, a paper's established scholarly authority, a higher academic citation count, is associated with a slower time to correction. Our findings highlight how the Wikipedia community supports collaborative maintenance but leaves gaps in citation-level repair. We contribute to CSCW research by advancing our understanding of this sociotechnical vulnerability, which takes the form of a community coordination challenge, and by offering design directions to support citation credibility at scale.

Problem

• Investigating how Wikipedia handles citations to retracted scientific research papers
• Analyzing the persistence of problematic citations without retraction status mentions
• Examining community coordination challenges in maintaining citation credibility at scale

Innovation

• Integrated Wikipedia revisions with Retraction Watch data
• Used survival analysis to study citation correction timing
• Identified scholarly authority slows problematic citation correction