Cited, then left behind
A Wikipedia figure that cites the World Bank links to the exact series it came from. That series keeps changing after the sentence is written.
358 of 2,730
World Bank citations on English Wikipedia sit beside a figure the cited series no longer gives. They are spread across 206 articles.
Most citations are a name and a title. A link to data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=KE is more than that. It names the series (Kenya's total population) precisely enough for a program to fetch it. So each figure beside such a link can be checked against the source it claims.
Every English Wikipedia article linking to a World Bank indicator was read: 1,270 articles and 2,730 citations. For each one, the figure beside the citation was matched to a year of the series it names. Three kinds of mismatch are reported:
| What the series says now | Figures |
|---|---|
| It has a newer year, and the sentence presents its figure as current | 155 |
| It gives a different value for the year the sentence states | 196 |
| The figure is some other year's value, not the year stated | 7 |
| Reported | 358 |
The newer-year cases are four years behind at the median, and 72 of the 155 are five or more. The most is 17. The different-value cases are mostly revisions: the World Bank re-estimates population, poverty and life expectancy after the fact, sometimes by a lot, and a sentence written from the first estimate keeps it.
Eight of them
| Article | As written | What the cited series says now |
|---|---|---|
| Colombia and the World Bank | extreme poverty 16.5 percent in 1996 | 24.8% for 1996, after the poverty line was revised |
| Economy of Laos | 15.7% on less than $3.00 a day (2018) | 7.1% in 2024 |
| Economy of Ethiopia | 78% employment rate (2023) | 66% for 2023 |
| Liberia | life expectancy 64.4 years in 2020 | 61.3 for 2020 |
| Bangladesh | maternal mortality 123 per 100,000, as of 2020 | 152 for 2020 |
| Economy of Romania | agriculture about 4.3% of GDP | the 2019 value; 3.0% in 2025 |
| Economy of Moldova | poverty rate 26.8% (2020) | 31.6% in 2023 |
| Jamaica and the World Bank | GNI per capita $4,990 (2018) | that is the 2016 value; 2018 was 5,610 |
None of these is vandalism, and most were right when written. That is the point. A figure is written down once and read for years. The page gives no sign of how old its figure is, while the link beside it goes to data that has moved on.
What was left out, and why
Most citations produced no finding, on purpose. A checker that is sometimes wrong is noise an editor learns to skip, so it stays silent wherever it cannot tie a figure to one year of one country's series:
| Citations not reported | Count |
|---|---|
| The link names no single country | 984 |
| No figure in the sentence matches any year of the series | 505 |
| No figure near the citation | 369 |
| The figure is right for the year the sentence gives | 266 |
| The figure matches the latest year | 234 |
| The World Bank has no data for the link | 14 |
"Right for its year" includes prose about the past ("fell to 3.3% in 1986"), changes over a period, and articles about states that no longer exist, whose figures belong to that state. A figure in those is true of its time, and a newer year does not make it wrong.
How this was done
The checker is freshcite, a single open-source Python file that reads and never edits. It found the articles through Wikipedia's Special:LinkSearch, read each one's source, and fetched each cited series from the World Bank's API. A figure written as "42.4" matches anything that rounds to it. A "different value" is reported only when the sentence states a year the series has, and the two are within a factor of two of each other and at least 2% apart.
How often it is right was measured by hand three times, each on 40 findings drawn at random from articles not read while the rules were written: 36, 36 and 34 of 40, 85 to 90 percent. The errors each sample found were fixed afterwards, and each re-run changed only the rows those fixes targeted. The latest rules have not been re-measured, so 85 to 90 percent is the figure to quote.
Every figure on this page is printed by python tools/findings.py reports/2026-09-26-worldbank.json --articles 1270 in the freshcite repository. The full list, with each sentence and a link to its series, is reports/2026-09-26-worldbank.md.
What this does not show: whether anyone fixes them. The list went to the Wikipedia editors who look after these articles on 2026-09-27, unedited: it is at User:Jorn3333/World Bank figures, announced on WikiProject Countries and Economics. A re-scan on 2026-10-27 will count how many rows were resolved, and that count decides whether the same check is worth running on other sources.