Jonathan Leybovich has been a contributor to the English-language Wikipedia since Spring 2003 and is currently helping develop a group of projects to improve citation and navigation among information resources on Wikipedia.
Abstract
2005 was an eventful year for Wikipedia, as its English language site approached the 1,000,000 article milestone, it held several successful fund-raising drives, and it attracted increasing levels of public and professional attention, including a favorable study in the journal Nature. Yet with increased attention comes increased scrutiny, and 2005 also saw several controversies, from the John Siegenthaler Sr. biography scandal to a ban on edits from Congressional Hill staffers.
Wikicite is an attempt to address growing concerns over the accuracy of Wikipedia by providing a scholarly apparatus for the creation, validation, and research of articles. An umbrella of projects more than a single project itself, Wikicite incorporates and integrates several existing proposed enhancements such as article validation, stable candidate designation and vote, and software-supported factual assertion citation into an integrated whole. Yet the project is not limited to merely ensuring the accuracy of Wikipedia articles; included as one of its deliverables is a complete bibliographic catalog database, Wikicat, and a text relationship database for mapping authority relationships within a particular scholarly literature. While valuable to article editors, this database is intended to stand on its own and become a unique and valuable online scholarly resource.