Cite Unseen

Cite Unseen

Presentation introducing Cite Unseen as delivered at CredCon Austin 2018
Description	User script that adds iconic indicators to Wikipedia citations
Authors	SuperHamster, Sky Harbor
Updated	2019-05-19 (430 days ago)
Version	In Beta
Script location	en:User:SuperHamster/CiteUnseen.js
Version control	https://github.com/KevinPayravi/Cite-Unseen
Phabricator	[1]
Skin support	Vector
Browser support	N/A

Cite Unseen is a Wikipedia user script that helps readers quickly evaluate the sources used in a given English Wikipedia article. The script adds iconic indicators to identified sources that indicate various attributes of the source, such as if the source is a news article, opinion piece, or government-controlled. This allows readers to quickly and easily identify the potential orientation and possible ideological biases of the sources used in an article they are reading.

Initially developed at CredCon in November 2018, Cite Unseen is jointly developed by Kevin Payravi (SuperHamster) and Josh Lim (Sky Harbor), with support from the Credibility Coalition and the Knowledge Graph Working Group. The project saw more development at Wikimedia Hackathon 2019.

The Cite Unseen script after running on en:President of the United States:

• The first source has been marked as a book.
• The second source has been marked as exceptionally biased; the Heritage Foundation is an American conservative think tank.
• The third source has been marked as a government-controlled press release.
• The fourth source was not recognized.
• The fifth source has been marked as a news article from the The Washington Post.
• The sixth source has been marked as an opinion piece.

Installation

The script is located at en:User:SuperHamster/CiteUnseen.js. You can add the script to your Wikipedia browsing experience by editing your common.js file and adding the following line:

{{subst:iusc|User:SuperHamster/CiteUnseen.js}}

Cite Unseen will automatically run whenever you open a Wikipedia page.

Contributing

• GitHub Repository
  • categorized-domains.json (for categorized domains)
  • categorized-strings.json (for categorized non-domain strings)
• Phabricator Board

Anyone is welcome and encouraged to contribute to either the code or JSON categorizations.

Next steps

Some of the next big goals for the project:

• Optimize
• Ensure wider browser compatibility
• Expand our lists of identified domains
• Support multiple languages

Technical implementation

Cite Unseen performs string matching on URLs, as well as checks for different types of citation templates, in order to identify the kind of work and any potential ideological leanings. For identifying exceptionally biased, conspiracy, and fake-news sources, Cite Unseen uses data from Media Bias Fact Check.

Cite Unseen is implemented in JavaScript. When Cite Unseen is run, it does the following:

• Iterates through every citation in a given Wikipedia article and pulls URLs.
• Checks each URL against a pre-defined list of domains and strings that are categorized by nature (biased, press, news, opinion piece, etc.).
• Injects icons next to citations accordingly.

Classifying sources

Currently, Cite Unseen classifies sources into twelve types:

Icon	Description
	News published in traditional reputable news sources
	User-generated news (e.g. from websites like Global Voices)
	Opinion pieces, including op-eds
	Blogs
	State media, excluding public broadcasters and other outlets where the state does not exercise tight editorial control, and government sources.
	Tabloid journalism, excluding newspapers that publish in tabloid size but are not tabloids
	Press releases
	Social media
	Books and other similar printed matter
	Identified by Media Bias Fact Check as being moderately to strongly biased towards certain political causes through story selection and/or political affiliation.
	This source has been identified by Media Bias Fact Check as conspiracy-pushing.
	This source has been identified by Media Bias Fact Check as fake news.