Wikipedia aims to be verifiable. Every statement of fact should be supported by a reliable source that the reader can check. Citations in Wikipedia typically refer to online documents accessible at URLs. But with the advent of standard web annotation we can do better. We can add citations to Wikipedia that refer precisely to statements that support Wikipedia articles.
According to Wikipedia’s policy on citing sources:
Wikipedia’s Verifiability policy requires inline citations for any material challenged or likely to be challenged, and for all quotations, anywhere in article space.
Last night, reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tubbs_Fire, I noticed this unsourced quote:
Sonoma County has four “historic wildfire corridors,” including the Hanly Fire area.
I searched for the source of that quotation, found it in a Press Democrat story, annotated the quote, and captured a Hypothesis direct link to the annotation. In this screenshot, I’ve clicked the annotation’s share icon, and then clicked the clipboard icon to copy the direct link to the clipboard. The direct link encapsulates the URL of the story, plus the information needed to locate the quotation within the story.
Given such a direct link, it’s straightforward to use it in a Wikipedia citation. Back in the Wikipedia page I clicked the Edit link, switched to the visual editor, set my cursor at the end of the unsourced quote, and clicked the visual editor’s Cite button to invoke this panel:
There I selected the news template, and filled in the form in the usual way, providing the title of the news story, its date, its author, the name of the publication, and the date on which I accessed the story. There was just one crucial difference. Instead of using the Press Democrat URL, I used the Hypothesis direct link.
And voilà! There’s my citation, number 69, nestled among all the others.
Citation, as we’ve known it, begs to be reinvented in the era of standard web annotation. When I point you to a document in support of a claim, I’m often thinking of a particular statement in that document. But the burden is on you to find that statement in the document to which my citation links. And when you do, you may not be certain you’ve found the statement implied by my link. When I use a direct link, I relieve you of that burden and uncertainty. You land in the cited document at the right place, with the supporting statement highlighted. And if it’s helpful we can discuss the supporting statement in that context.
I can envision all sorts of ways to turbocharge Wikipedia’s workflow with annotation-powered tools. But no extra tooling is required to use Hypothesis and Wikipedia in the way I’ve shown here. If you find an unsourced quote in Wikipedia, just annotate it in its source context, capture the direct link, and use it in the regular citation workflow. For a reader who clicks through Wikipedia citations to check original sources, this method yields a nice improvement over the status quo.
Absolutely, direct links to a sentence or section (or whatever selection) beat general page links. I’m happy to see that the hyp.is link doesn’t hide the original URL so that when hyp.is is gone (it’s more likely than not to disappear before wikipedia does), future editors can at least edit the link back to its original source (if of course the archives of The Press Democrat) are still around.
> future editors can at least edit the link back to its original source
Yes. And/or, another redirector can be used.
Ideally the citation’s target (if 404) could also be retrieved, e.g. from Wayback, and used to anchor the annotations.