Wikipedia citations get way more legit with the addition of books

Everyone knows that to legitimize anything you read on Wikipedia, the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia, you need to scroll to the bottom of the page and check out the references, notes, and citations (or click the little footnote link in the text).

The Internet Archive, known for its Wayback Machine, will now be a resource for book-based citations if that text exists within its library. Previously, only citations linking back to an online source were viewable. Now, some book references will be available online as well.

In a Tuesday post about "weaving books into the internet," the San Francisco-based non-profit explained how it was taking digitized versions of books and matching them with corresponding Wikipedia citations, so long as those citations reference specific page numbers.

That means you don't simply have to trust that some fact about Daylight Saving Time really was sourced from the book listed. Now you can see why the Wikipedia entry seems so sure about how ancient Romans kept time.

The book previews are hosted on archive.com and provide context ofnwhere whatever fact, quote, or tidbit came from. Right down to the chapter, preceding paragraphs, and in some cases the entire book. You can also borrow digital copies of certain books.

By the numbers, the Internet Archive has already linked 130,000 book references on Wikipedia to 50,000 digital books. It's planning to keep it going. But it costs the non-profit about $20 per book for the digital transformation.

Google Books is another book sourcing option if you're interested in taking more of a DIY approach, since it's not linked to Wikipedia citations. You still have to manually search for a reference material and see if Google has a copy scanned.

Wikipedia can feel like a dubious source because so many people contribute and there's so much potential for inaccuracy, but now we've got even more receipts.