# Fine Grained Citation Span for References in Wikipedia

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07278 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07278/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Improving Wikipedia Verifiability with AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06220/) (2022)
- [Modeling citation worthiness by using attention-based bidirectional long short-term memory networks and interpretable models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12206/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Verifiability is one of the core editing principles in Wikipedia, editors being encouraged to provide citations for the added content. For a Wikipedia article, determining the citation span of a citation, i.e. what content is covered by a citation, is important as it helps decide for which content citations are still missing. We are the first to address the problem of determining the citation span in Wikipedia articles. We approach this problem by classifying which textual fragments in an article are covered by a citation. We propose a sequence classification approach where for a paragraph and a citation, we determine the citation span at a fine-grained level. We provide a thorough experimental evaluation and compare our approach against baselines adopted from the scientific domain, where we show improvement for all evaluation metrics.