Wikipedia is an incredible source, but the correctness of claims posted on its pages is most of the times called into question. To enhance the website’s usability and credibility, the Internet Archive is operating to make references simpler to follow by connecting them to books’ digital copies.

Till now, 50,000 digitized books that are hosted by the Archive have been connected to 130,000 references. To watch an example in action for the new digital referencing, you can go to the Martin Luther King, Jr page on Wikipedia. If you see at the reference for To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference & Martin Luther King Jr (Adam Fairclough’s book) at the page’s bottom, you will see it is a clickable link. Clicking navigates you to the digital version of the book in the Internet Archive.

When you unlock a digital book provided by the Archive, you can watch a few pages of preview to see the reference data. If you need to read extra, you can lend a digital copy of the book via their initiative (Controlled Digital Lending).

The linking to digital books of references is done both by robots and by users, and has been conducted in the Greek, English, and Arabic editions of Wikipedia. The Internet Archive claims that it aims to carry on working with Wikipedia societies to scan extra books and connect them to references. This is not the first time the 2 websites have collaborated together, as the group earlier assisted to fix 9 Million broken links with the help of its Wayback Machine archive on the encyclopedia.

“Together we can attain global access to All Knowledge,” claimed Director of the Wayback Machine project, Mark Graham, to the media in an interview. “One linked paper, book, news article, web page, video, music file, and image at a time.”