Adoption of the English Perennial Sources List in Non-English Wikipedias

Determine whether editors from non-English Wikipedia language editions adopted or used the English Wikipedia Reliable sources/Perennial sources list when evaluating or selecting references, to assess whether the observed editorial behavior change after the guideline’s introduction generalizes beyond the English edition.

Background

The paper analyzes a “natural experiment” to assess editorial behavior changes in English Wikipedia associated with the introduction of the Reliable sources/Perennial sources list on 2018-07-01. To isolate the effect, the authors restrict their analysis to English-language datasets.

They explicitly note uncertainty about whether editors in other language editions reference or rely on the English perennial sources list. Establishing whether non-English Wikipedias adopted the English guideline is necessary to evaluate if similar behavior changes occurred cross-lingually and to extend the experimental design beyond English.