  The exponential increase in the usage of Wikipedia as a key source of
scientific knowledge among the researchers is making it absolutely necessary to
metamorphose this knowledge repository into an integral and self-contained
source of information for direct utilization. Unfortunately, the references
which support the content of each Wikipedia entity page, are far from complete.
Why are the reference section ill-formed for most Wikipedia pages? Is this
section edited as frequently as the other sections of a page? Can there be
appropriate surrogates that can automatically enhance the reference section? In
this paper, we propose a novel two step approach -- WikiRef -- that (i)
leverages the wikilinks present in a scientific Wikipedia target page and,
thereby, (ii) recommends highly relevant references to be included in that
target page appropriately and automatically borrowed from the reference section
of the wikilinks. In the first step, we build a classifier to ascertain whether
a wikilink is a potential source of reference or not. In the following step, we
recommend references to the target page from the reference section of the
wikilinks that are classified as potential sources of references in the first
step. We perform an extensive evaluation of our approach on datasets from two
different domains -- Computer Science and Physics. For Computer Science we
achieve a notably good performance with a precision@1 of 0.44 for reference
recommendation as opposed to 0.38 obtained from the most competitive baseline.
For the Physics dataset, we obtain a similar performance boost of 10% with
respect to the most competitive baseline.
