I have a few thoughts on this:<p>1. When I created [citation needed] I never cared that people would source unreliable information. At that point I wanted to see the sources that were being used, and if they were unreliable then say so and under NPOV either make the fact or view less prominent, or remove it entirely. After all, when balancing neutrality with accuracy you shouldn&#x27;t need to give equal weight to every crackpot theory.<p>However, access to material was a different issue. I tried a brief experiment called &quot;bookcasing&quot; where everyone could list the sources they physically owned, with the idea that if you needed to have material verified you could reach out to those people and have them check the material for you. Sort of like a crowd sourced fact checker.<p>It looks to me like Sci-Hub might now be the best way for Wikipedia to verify sources. There are many editors who don&#x27;t have access to university where these things are freely available. The fact that information is not freely available to verify for Wikipedia highlights the fact that corporate interests slow down research and actively cause false and misleading information to be propagated!<p>2. The article asserts that it would be too expensive to make journals free. That&#x27;s not exactly correct - a good portion of scientific work and research is government funded. As has been pointed out time and again, the journals don&#x27;t pay for the research, they only pay to vet and publish the research. They are making profits of 30% and leveraging the research dollars paid by the general public.<p>In fact, I think that if they want to publish work, then I&#x27;d like to see them be forced to pay for 25% of the costs of the research. I&#x27;m pretty certain at this point you would see them squeal that it&#x27;s too expensive - at which point we can point out that they aren&#x27;t the ones who do the bulk of the work that allows them to publish in the first place!<p>3. There is nothing stopping third parties from creating a plugin themselves that verifies the transparency and availability of sources.<p>I can see a number of metrics I&#x27;d be interested in.<p>* a score that works out a weighting for reliability of journals. So in other words, it would penalise the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine for not making clear how they judge the manuscripts they publish<p>* another might utilise an impact score<p>* others might look at the weight that an article gives to a particular viewpoint to give insights into its neutrality.<p>It would be nice to be able to do this in Wikimedia and to be able to data analysis with the working clearly shown on how the metrics are derived.<p>It&#x27;s workable, and I think it would be insightful!