r/science • u/asbruckman Professor | Interactive Computing • 1d ago
Social Science Citations to retracted scientific papers on Wikipedia last on average 5.8 years before they are removed or marked as retracted
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3817014281
u/norbertus 1d ago
This is a major problem not just in Wikipedia, but throughout science
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u/asbruckman Professor | Interactive Computing 1d ago
This was one of the papers I found most interesting at the CSCW 2026 conference (where all the papers are peer reviewed.) I agree with everyone noting that this happens in published papers--yes it does. It's easier to fix on Wikipedia than in a publication.
At the presentation, I told the authors, "Dude, fix it!" Their code identifies all the problems. Auto-removing a cite is hard, but putting a note on the article's talk page saying "hey, someone might want to fix this" is easy. And so is making a page with a list of ones to fix. I'm sure some editors would enjoy being on the retraction squad. I would. The presenter/author said they have started discussions with the Wikimedia Foundation about helping them to do better at catching retractions.
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u/BeetusPLAYS 1d ago
Thanks for pushing them to action! My knee jerk feeling was the same as yours. I understand the need to do something like this 'properly' but c'mon.
Would be a very satisfying list to work through. Though I do wonder how difficult it would be to accurately update the articles at scale - kinda need domain expertise to handle this work.
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u/seekingpeacefulness 1d ago
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 the citations were initially problematic and in need of reader-facing repair, defined as those added before the paper’s retraction (51.5%) or introduced afterwards without proper warning (20.1%). While many are eventually corrected, our analysis reveals that these citations persist for a median of 5.8 years (2,106 days). Through survival analysis, we find that RetractionBot flagging, open access availability, pre-existing online visibility (e.g., Twitter/X mention counts), and page-level organization (e.g., number of categories on a Wikipedia page) are associated with a higher hazard of correction. Conversely, 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.
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u/Tyrrox 1d ago
And this is why wikipedia is, while a great place to get general ideas for research, not the final place anyone should be citing for facts.
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u/BeefBabyboo 1d ago
Rule of thumb if you use wiki should always be:
Wiki info > find original source > verify on original source
If you use AI to research in any capacity (looking at you google) then you also need to follow those sources. Chances are the info you're being told doesnt even exist in the source if it even exists, it'll make up fake links just to generate info.
The amount of times I'm on wiki, read something, look for the source to it non-existent and then finding the information is being perpetually regurgitated by non-legitmate sources is insane.
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u/Tyrrox 1d ago
Agree completely. Wikipedia is a launching point, not an ending point. It always should be verified for accuracy.
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u/BeefBabyboo 1d ago
Oh I have no doubt you already knew this. Just shouting it for the kids in the back of the class.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 1d ago
The same problem often persists in actual scientific papers.
Paper 1: [makes claim]
Paper 2: [repeats claim][cites Paper 1]
[paper 1 retracted]
Paper 2 remains unredacted with the claims repeated.
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u/TimelyStill 1d ago
To be totally fair, this issue exists anywhere. You can read a highly cited paper from five years ago and notice redacted papers in its references. With Wikipedia, there is at least a community of people following up on articles if the topic is active, but there is no incentive to update old papers because everyone involved has already been paid. The lesson is always that you need to refer to primary sources whenever you can.
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u/-XanderCrews- 1d ago
It has flaws but based on how people gather information these days it’s far more trustworthy than places like Reddit Facebook and Tik tok. They at least have and show sources. There are people out there that actually care if it’s telling the truth and change it. It’s a far more good faith source than it gets credit for.
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u/dongeckoj 1d ago
Sure but Wikipedia is still a tertiary source like all encyclopedias. Often times there is someone babysitting a page to revert changes they don’t like even if they are supported by secondary sources
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u/Caelinus 1d ago
The problem is that laypeople cannot read primary sources, even if they have access to them. They lack the contextual knowledge to understand what they actually mean and how confident they should be in those meanings.
So telling people to follow the Wikipedia links to the sources is not really helpful. It does not actually solve any problems.
What we really need is a real automatic system that invalidates and flags stale information, not just for Wikipedia and aggregators, but for science papers themselves. Simply telling people to get a high level education so they can really contextualize a wiki article is not something that will work.
And even in cases where the information is lower stakes/easier to understand, trying to solve problems by herding individuals into more pro-spcisl behavior never actually works. You have to create an incentive for them to do it so they make the decision themselves, and there is not really a good way to do that with things like Wikipedia, so the fix has to be upstream of the problem, not at it.
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u/dongeckoj 1d ago
Wikipedia usually uses secondary rather than primary sources so this doesn’t matter so much. People need to be trained like historians in how to distinguish good sources in this age of AI
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u/Caelinus 1d ago
Secondary sources have an identical problem to Wikipedia, but are updated even less.
And "Trained like historians" is the exact problem I am describing. That will never happen. It just is not a real possibility, and so expending effort to accomplish is burning political will to accomplish nothing.
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u/Nixinova 1d ago
That's a bit overstating it really. If even published papers keep citations to retracted works, this is a fundamental problem with the concept of citing really.
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u/baculumsounder 1d ago
I've seen pages where the retracted paper is cited, the retraction and controversy cited, and the retracted paper still being cited otherwise all on the same page.
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u/StickFigureFan 1d ago
Given old encyclopedias would only be published every 10 years this isn't that bad
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u/TarArov 1d ago
Forcing the automatic removal of citations from older papers completely ignores the fact that fields like classical thermodynamics or structural carpentry reach a definitive engineering endpoint where the foundational laws simply do not change,,
by aggressively scrubbing these citations after a few years just because a topic has been solved, the system risks treating finalized, baseline principles as if they are 'outdated tech' rather than a completed framework that has already stood the test of time
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u/asbruckman Professor | Interactive Computing 1d ago
We're not talking about older citations--we're talking about retracted papers, aka scientific misconduct.
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u/lookamazed 21h ago
Wikipedia has so much revisionism and fraud. It’s ridiculous. Rings of editors who move claims into lesser known areas and then lock them. They can’t be edited for months. Total abuse.
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u/DavidOrzc 16h ago
To be honest, that sounds pretty decent. High school teachers used to teach theories proven wrong already a loooong time ago.
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