Contested Citations: The Role of Open Access Publications in Wikipedia's Scientific Disputes

TL;DR

This study analyzes how Open Access (OA) publications participate in scientific disputes on Wikipedia by linking edit histories with bibliometric metadata from Crossref, OpenAlex, and Wikipedia. It identifies 2,221 dispute episodes involving 3,514 publications across 1,669 articles, using a seven-day window to define dispute events and a validation pipeline to ensure reliability. Findings show disputes are more frequent in social sciences and humanities, and OA articles are more likely to be involved and to enter disputes earlier, with substantial discipline-specific variation. The work demonstrates OA's dual effect of expanding access while intensifying public scrutiny on a high-visibility collaborative platform, offering insights for open science, scholarly communication, and digital knowledge governance.

Abstract

Wikipedia is one of the largest online encyclopedias, which relies on scientific publications as authoritative sources. The increasing prevalence of open access (OA) publishing has expanded the public availability of scientific knowledge; however, its impact on the dynamics of knowledge contestation within collaborative environments such as Wikipedia remains underexplored. To address this gap, we analyze a large-scale dataset that combines Wikipedia edit histories with metadata from scientific publications cited in disputed Wikipedia articles. Our study investigates the characteristics of scientific publications involved in disputes and examines whether OA articles are more likely to be contested than paywalled ones. We find that scientific disputes on Wikipedia are more frequent in the social sciences and humanities, where topics often involve social values and interpretative variability. Publications with higher citation counts and publications in high-impact journals are more likely to be involved in disputes. OA publications are significantly more likely to be involved in disputes and tend to be contested sooner after publication than paywalled articles. This pattern suggests that increased accessibility accelerates both engagement and scrutiny. The relationship between OA status and dispute involvement also varies across disciplines, reflecting differences in Wikipedia editorial practices and norms. These findings highlight the dual role of OA in both expanding access to scientific knowledge and increasing its visibility in contexts of public negotiation and debate. This study contributes to a broader understanding of how scientific knowledge is collaboratively constructed and contested on open platforms, offering insights for research on open science, scholarly communication, and digital knowledge governance.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Merging procedure for scientific disputes.
• Figure 2: Distribution of scientific dispute durations across disciplines.
• Figure 3: Temporal trends and disciplinary distribution of scientific disputes.
• Figure 4: Dispute frequency and journal Prestige (SNIP).
• Figure 5: Average dispute duration by editor type and concept.