The extent to which a Wikipedia article refers to external sources to substantiate its content can be seen as a measure of its externally invoked authority. We introduce a protocol for characterising the referencing process in the context of general article editing. With a sample of relatively mature articles, we show that referencing does not occur regularly through an article's lifetime but is associated with periods of more substantial editing, when the article has reached a certain level of maturity (in terms of the number of times it has been revised and its length). References also tend to be contributed by editors who have contributed more frequently and more substantially to an article, suggesting that a subset of more qualified or committed editors may exist for each article.
['Chih-Chun Chen', 'Camille Roth']
{{Citation needed}}: the dynamics of referencing in Wikipedia