Description | User script that adds visual indicators when a diff includes the addition of a URL from a questionable source |
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Author(s) | Harej, Ocaasi |
First released | April 23, 2024 |
Updated | June 12, 2024 |
Source |
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The Citation Watchlist is a user script that adds visual indicators to watchlist, recent changes, and page history entries when unreliable sources are added to articles. Indicators, including ❗ for warnings (more severe) and ✋ for cautions (less severe), appear only on the addition of unreliable URLs – not URLs that are already in the article. This makes the Citation Watchlist an efficient tool for analyzing individual edits for unreliable sources.
The vision for the Citation Watchlist is to make tracking changes in references, especially to unreliable sources, as easy as tracking other changes to articles of interest. All experienced editors track changes through their Watchlist, a customized feed of recent changes of articles. The Citation Watchlist adds a clear visual overlay highlighting the addition of spurious or prohibited sources within individual edits, with more information just a hover away.
importScript('User:Harej/citation-watchlist.js');
There are three 'levels' of indicators, suggesting how much caution or investigation is warranted upon finding a domain. Warn and Caution, the first two, are drawn from lists with community consensus like Perennial Reliable Sources List. Everything else is under Inspect, including lists from other source reliability tools.
All editors should use discretion and judgment with each source and usage of that source. Even many 'bad' sources can be used in very specific contexts.
Citation Watchlist screens added URLs against lists. The list of these lists is defined at Wikipedia:Citation Watchlist/Lists. These lists are formatted for the bot to easily process. The default list is Perennial Sources List.
Other lists editors have developed such as predatory journals, pseudoscience, political influence, etc. The goal of our approach is that if anyone wants to change a list, they only need to update a regular wiki page instead of diving into the JavaScript where the code lives.
Once the script is capable of drawing from multiple lists at once, we will add the ability for users to enable/disable those lists per their individual preferences.
The next step of this work, which is in progress, is to add support for community members to add their own lists on top of the standard ones. (A similar approach is used by ad-blocking tools where there is not a single trove of links, but lists of links that editors can choose to opt-in or opt-out of. Of course, instead of blocking links, we are revealing them for scrutiny and intervention.)
Phase 2 of the project needs more support for development of a mature, integrated toolset that can be used widely across Wikipedia as a built-in "Gadget", or even adopted directly into the watchlist filtering system.
What's missing, and would take additional time and funding?