Global 'Missing DOI' Wikipedia Reference Drift
Tracking how Wikipedia’s scholarly citations silently lose their DOI links over time.
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About this data
This page measures how often Wikipedia references lose their DOI links, a process known as ‘reference drift.’ It tracks the proportion of dead DOI links in Wikipedia citations and the median time it takes for a DOI to become inaccessible. The data is derived from regular scans of Wikipedia’s citation database, focusing on references tagged with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Understanding this decay is crucial because it reveals the fragility of scholarly sourcing in the world’s largest encyclopedia, where broken links undermine the reliability of academic citations. By quantifying this issue, the page highlights the need for better maintenance of scholarly references in open knowledge projects.
Why this isn't published anywhere else
No existing sources track the specific decay of DOI links in Wikipedia references over time as a systematic study.
Uniqueness score 1.00 — assessed against live web search results when this subject was created.