How Grounded is Wikipedia? A Study on Structured Evidential Support and Retrieval

摘要

Wikipedia is a critical resource for modern NLP, serving as a rich repository of up-to-date and citation-backed information on a wide variety of subjects. The reliability of Wikipedia—its groundedness in its cited sources—is vital to this purpose. This work analyzes both how grounded Wikipedia is and how readily fine-grained grounding evidence can be retrieved. To this end, we introduce PeopleProfiles—a large-scale, multi-level dataset of claim support annotations on biographical Wikipedia articles. We show that: ~22% of claims in Wikipedia *lead* sections are unsupported by the article body; ~30% of annotated claims in the article *body* are unsupported by their (publicly accessible) sources; and real-world Wikipedia citation practices often differ from documented standards. Finally, we show that complex evidence retrieval remains a challenge—even for recent reasoning rerankers.