A quick primer on citing sources for Wikipedia
more than you wanted to know
I hope everyone is doing well (all three of you reading this) — I spent Leap Day 2024 (and then March 1) gloriously doing nothing. That means now I’ve got to be productive.
Remember how my first real post on this Substack was about Wikipedia? I figured I ought to return to my roots. I’ve been editing Wikipedia since I was an undergraduate. I’ve maintained, as a matter of pride, a habit of making at least one edit in each calendar month. Within the past year or so, I’ve been conscientious to try and make at least ten edits in each month-long span, because that’s how many are needed to access the Wikipedia Library.1 Not that I always hit the latter number, but I try.
Anyways, because I believe in only saying things when I have something useful to say, and because I believe Wikipedia is the most useful thing there is, hold onto your asses, because I’m about to infodump about how sources are cited in Wikipedia articles.2 I will divide my subsequent ramble into two sections, dealing with the Philosophy and the Mechanics of citing sources.
The Philosophy
There’s a basic rule of thumb for creating Wikipedia articles. For almost any topic, you need to find multiple reliable independent sources before you can start writing up an article.
This is a paraphrase of Wikipedia’s General Notability Guideline, which is found on Wikipedia’s policy page for Notability. The page does a pretty good job of breaking down the guideline into its component parts and briefly explaining each one. Sometimes, a topic may technically meet the requirements but not be appropriate for an article. And the sources need to be more than a one-off mention: just because multiple people have remarked on the fact that Bill Clinton used to be in a high school jazz band doesn’t mean Wikipedia needs to have an article on the band.3
There are also subject-specific notability guidelines, usually because some editors have founded a Wikiproject and have written more guidelines for when a topic should be presumed to have notability.4
And the part about “independent” sources is exactly what it sounds like. You can’t just base an article entirely off the word of its subject. You can cite people talking about themselves, to a degree, particularly for uncontroversial claims (e.g. if you need to know when a particular company was founded, you can probably just cite their “About us” webpage). If the only thing you have to go on is a bunch of self-published promotional material, though, that’s no good at all.
But reliable sources! Now we’re getting into the fun stuff. (At least, what I think of as fun.) Wikipedia has its own information about reliable sources; if you’re like me, you might spend an afternoon just reading through Wikipedia’s policies.5 Let me distill everything down even further — this is a blog post, not a copy-and-paste job, after all.
How do you know a source is reliable?
If you’re writing about a historical topic, you will likely be looking for books. Is the publisher affiliated with a university, i.e. a university press? Or is it from a specialized academic publisher, usually for-profit — something like Routledge or Wolters Kluwer? Or is it from a general-interest nonfiction publisher, like one of the relevant imprints owned by Simon & Schuster?
Each will, of course, have differing levels of expertise and rigor. It’s perfectly possible that one of the latter two will put out a perfectly respectable book — or that a university press will put out garbage — but consider: whose eyes have been on the book, and what safeguards are in place? Same thing with periodicals, either academic journals (often put out by the same kind of publishers) or, for more current topics like popular culture, newspapers: what kind of editorial control is being exercised?
The Wikipedia community maintains a list of perennial sources, i.e. sources that have been repeatedly discussed in the past and on which the community has come to some sort of consensus. Some sources are generally reliable. Some sources aren’t. Some sources are so bad that Wikipedia editors have agreed to avoid using them altogether.6
One common thing that comes up (repeatedly) in such discussions is: well, [insert newspaper here] got something wrong, so we should downgrade their reliability! But that’s not quite how things work. Sources are allowed to be factually wrong — ideally, you’d have enough sources to show what’s scholarly consensus and what’s an unfortunate outlier.7 There is, of course, a difference between a newspaper that flubs a story and a website that doesn’t have any consistent editorship because it’s really just a collaborative blog. Are they trying to get things right? Is there a history of doing research, and issuing a retraction if necessary?
And there’s other things to consider. Obviously sources need to be published in some way — you can’t cite a private conversation you had with a person, or an email that only you have read8 — but what about self-published sources? There’s an essay about that. (You can use them, especially if the author knows what they’re doing, but you can’t make an entire Wikipedia article from self-published sources.) Or whether to use primary, secondary, tertiary sources — again, there’s an essay about that.9
Look, if you’re thinking about writing something, just do it. What’s the worst that could happen? Maybe someone reverts your edits or nominates the page for deletion. Whatever. The gulf between “this topic lacks a Wikipedia article” and “this topic has a barebones, probably unfinished Wikipedia article” is vast. Find some sources and get to writing!
The Mechanics
Right, I guess I should mention how to find some sources. And, once found, what one does with them.
Despite everything that Google has done wrong — they seem uniquely dedicated to ruining their flagship service, Google Search — they’re the first step for finding sources. Google Books and to some extent Google Scholar may prove useful. Google News occasionally works for current events and popular culture topics. And a regular ol’ Google Search might still find stuff, too. (Remember to search in quotation marks to return exact responses to a query; sometimes you may need that.)
If you’re lucky, you found something useful — a webpage from a reliable source, a PDF of some printed text, an open-access article. But it may be that the preview you get from Google Books doesn’t quite cover all the information you want. Or you find a source that refers to another, better source, but that source isn’t available online.
It’s time to dig a bit deeper! I’ve mentioned the Wikipedia Library, which is a gold mine if you have an active Wikipedia account — there are so many databases included, you can view literally millions of articles and even some books, if they’re published by the right people. Another good resource is WorldCat.org, which lets you look up books and find nearby libraries that might have a copy you can borrow.10 Many public domain books have been digitized by Project Gutenberg. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the Internet Archive, which lets you search through a phenomenal number of books with a free account. You might not even have to go to the library if you have digital access at home. That’s the magic behind the Internet Archive (which has tremendous potential, though its books are a bit disorganized). And I’m not even getting into your local public library and their digital offerings, either.
Okay, let’s assume you’ve got your sources — books, journal articles, newspaper articles, maybe a webpage from a .edu domain.11 Now you need to read it and extract information. One of my favorite Wikipedia how-to essays describes how to mine a source. When you’re reading the relevant part of a source, make a note of everything relevant. When I create a Wikipedia article (as I have done a couple dozen of times), I often will write out, with pen and paper, a list of facts that I have found, categorized according to their originating source. I can then start arranging my facts for the article, and each time I list something I can go back and note which source (or sources) it came from. I tag them with a quick word or two and then come back later, once I’ve got the draft finished, to insert full citations.
Now, at long last, you’re ready to actually create citations.
Wikipedia doesn’t really have a “house style.” If you want to cite sources a particular way, as long as you’re including enough information to identify your sources, nobody really cares. But a lot of people, from what I remember, hate being told to use MLA or APA or Chicago-Turabian or the Bluebook. Fortunately, Wikipedia has shortcuts.
The first thing you do is, at the end of the article, you put the text {{Reflist}} somewhere (typically under a section header called “References” or “Citations” or “Footnotes”). Then, everywhere you want to put a footnote, you use <ref> and </ref> to enclose whatever text goes into a footnote.12
You can put whatever text you want in a footnote. However, for consistency, I strongly recommend using citation templates. Due to their ubiquity of use, they’re the closest thing that Wikipedia has to a “house style.”
Say you want to cite a book. Go to the page for Template:Cite book. Copy one of the samples under the “Usage” header; you probably won’t need every parameter, especially at first. Then just fill it out with whatever information you have. After “last=”, put the author’s last name. After “title=”, put the work’s title.
Once you’ve got that filled out, paste it between <ref> and </ref> and your footnote will appear at the end of the Wikipedia article where you put {{Reflist}}. Isn’t that real fuckin’ neato?
Coda
This is by no means a comprehensive handbook. Just a quick overview, really.
You might note, for example, that some Wikipedia articles put each citation into its own footnote (example 1). Others use shortened footnotes, where footnotes lead to abbreviated citations followed by a full list of sources (example 2). I don’t feel like explaining all of that; just consult the documentation and copy formatting from existing articles.
Like with most things, practice makes perfect. And if you get unusually into the kinds of things that make good Wikipedia articles, guess what? You too can be part of the largest human knowledge project in the world — right now!
I have personal reasons for wanting to maintain free access to academic databases; additionally, I enjoy being able to help friends with their own research projects. For almost a decade after graduating high school, I still had access to JSTOR through an account I created circa fall 2010; then JSTOR changed something up and I no longer had unlimited access, but fortunately by then Wikipedia had stepped in to fill that void. I still use my old login for nostalgia purposes.
If you’re looking for how to cite Wikipedia, Wikipedia has an informative page for you already! The short answer is that you really shouldn’t. Use Wikipedia as a jumping-off point for further research — and if you do, keep in mind that some articles may be unfinished and you’ll have to put in your own legwork at some point in the process. If you only use the sources listed in a Wikipedia article, you may be missing out. (Unless you’re citing a Wikipedia article that I wrote, which are typically exhaustively researched.) If you’re not writing for a scholarly audience — for example, you are a YouTube content creator who produces video essays — then obviously, nobody’s grading you on citation format; all you have to do is just tell people where you got the information you’re relaying. Some video essayists (particularly popular history or science) are entertaining enough but it’s obvious (to me) when their engagement with the topic seems to have begun and ended with a romp through Wikipedia. YouTube isn’t necessarily a site to find in-depth scholarly sources, so whatever. But, of course, there’s a fine line between “I read about this 20th-century warlord on Wikipedia and now I’m rambling about it!” versus “I am literally copying wholesale from smaller creators, making money off of it, and using my fans to bludgeon any critics into silence.” (If it wasn’t clear enough from this lengthy footnote, I have strong opinions. Do what you like, but don’t be an asshole.)
Although as of right now, it actually does have such an article.
For example, if a chess player reaches the rank of grandmaster, or has some prominent tournament victories, or has written a notable chess book, they will likely satisfy the notability requirements for WikiProject Chess. Keep in mind, of course, that the subject-specific requirements are an addendum to, not a replacement for, the general notability guideline.
Indeed, I have spent many enjoyable afternoons (and evenings) reading through Wikipedia’s policies.
This started with The Daily Mail being deprecated about a decade ago and has since been expanded to other highly unreliable sources. And then there are websites that have been blacklisted for promoting spam and thus cannot be used, either.
When writing the Wikipedia article for my distinguished ancestor, Yang Jisheng, I included a quote from noted Western sinologist Herbert Giles to the effect of “his name has no place in literature.” I then included (with citations) discussions of numerous Chinese-language literary works about Yang Jisheng.
But you could, of course, publish an article somewhere about your experiences and then cite yourself.
Primary sources are sources with firsthand knowledge, someone writing about their experiences or other kinds of “raw material” in other scholarly fields. Secondary sources are sources that analyze primary sources e.g. a book about the Civil War that extensively cites letters written by soldiers. Tertiary sources are sources that synthesize secondary sources, as most encyclopedias do — indeed, as Wikipedia does. Wikipedia articles can cite to a variety of sources, but they should mostly be secondary sources — providing a good summary and overview of current scholarship — with occasional flavoring from the other kinds of sources.
Beware of libraries that only have a digital copy and thus require you to be a member in order to access — not so bad if it’s your local public library, rather more of an inconvenience if it’s a university library.
A .edu domain isn’t everything — there’s sites like academia.edu that are not actually affiliated with an educational institution but were grandfathered in — and sometimes you just find some emeritus professor’s personal webpage where they scribble unhinged ramblings. That said, sometimes you find really useful stuff, like a school of architecture’s report on a historic building; just think about what kind of source you’ve encountered.
I’m assuming you’re using the traditional “source editing” interface which uses Wikipedia’s “wikitext” markup language. There is also a visual editor but I hate it and you should too. It’s clunky and stupid.