An overview of Wikipedia citation statistics

Although I have known of Wikipedia’s citation templates for some time — it is true that when I first made edits there I either did not use them or they had not been created — it is only recently that I have studied them in detail.

What one might call the “big four” — {{cite book}}, {{cite journal}}, {{cite news}}, {{cite web}} — have been familiar to me for some years now, because they can be used directly when adding a citation without copying the blank template from the appropriate linked site below. It is only recently though that I have attempted to look at all the templates in “Citation style 1”, and to see if and where I can use them.

A few days ago, I edited an article on the geography of Antarctica and did not know what to do with publications of the Geological Society of London, and of “Scientific Reports”. Presuming by the title that they must be reports of some sort, and seeing they did not fit the criteria to use {{cite report}} (a template I had used before discussing civil rights politics),  I put them under {{cite tech report}} — a rarely-used template found in only a little over two thousand Wikipedia articles (vis-à-vis over a million for the “big four”).

However, re-reading the template for {{cite tech report}}, it was clear to me that the articles I had cited therewith on Geography of Antarctica did not fit the criteria for {{cite tech report}}. They seemed to be closer to {{cite conference}} or {{cite journal}}, although I know nothing about what conference proceedings are.

The problems I had with this made me both message my brother for some discussion and to actually tabulate the frequencies of the various {{cite...}} templates, which I have done below, alongside percentages of Wikipedia pages used and how the template appears in links (if it does do so).

Frequencies and Appearance in Reference Texts of All Style 1 Wikipedia Templates:

Template	# of Wikipedia pages	% of Wikipedia pages	Template in reference text
{{cite arXiv}}	5,865	0.0099%	in link
{{cite AV media}}	61,062	0.10%	as |type=
{{cite AV media notes}}	29,630	0.050%	as |type=
{{cite bioRxiv}}	415	0.00070%	in link
{{cite book}}	1,763,420	3.0%
{{cite CiteSeerX}}	427	0.00072%	in link
{{cite conference}}	19,030	0.032%
{{cite document}}	1,653	0.0028%	as |type=
{{cite encyclopedia}}	219,847	0.37%
{{cite episode}}	18,233	0.031%	as |number=
{{cite interview}}	9,492	0.016%	(Interview)
{{cite journal}}	1,094,239	1.9%
{{cite magazine}}	338,377	0.57%
{{cite mailing list}}	811	0.0014%	(Mailing list)
{{cite map}}	46,609	0.079%	(Map)
{{cite medRxiv}}	159	0.00027%	in link
{{cite news}}	1,734,008	2.9%
{{cite newsgroup}}	653	0.0011%
{{cite podcast}}	5,158	0.0087%	(Podcast)
{{cite press release}}	76,594	0.13%	(Press release)
{{cite report}}	61,348	0.10%	(Report)
{{cite serial}}	279	0.00047%
{{cite sign}}	833	0.0014%	as |medium=
{{cite speech}}	1,426	0.0024%	(Speech)
{{cite SSRN}}	557	0.00094%	in link
{{cite tech report}}	2,351	0.0040%	(Technical report)
{{cite thesis}}	41,638	0.071%	(Thesis)
{{cite web}}	5,013,194	8.5%