Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not an acceptable citation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an essay. It is not a policy or guideline. Please update the page as needed, or discuss it on the talk page.

Wikipedia is probably the wrong source to cite unless the researcher is a primary school pupil. As with all encyclopedias, Wikipedia is a tertiary source and is rarely appropriate as a citation for academic, business, or journalistic research. The aim of such research is to uncover comprehensive and accurate information, which is located in primary sources and secondary sources.

[edit] Reasons

Some people distrust Wikipedia because anyone can edit it. Good arguments exist both in support and against this viewpoint. Wikipedia is a very young project run almost entirely by volunteer editors and its quality is uneven. If an article contains numerous misspellings and grammatical errors then that article probably has problems on other levels. At the other extreme, Wikipedia's best articles contain meticulous line citations and bibliographies. So when a page looks brilliant, balanced, and referenced follow those references to the original sources, read those sources, and cite the originals.

While Wikipedia can be a good casual read and an excellent starting point for research, researchers who cite Wikipedia articles look lazy and careless. This holds about equally true for any encyclopedia citation - eight-year-olds do their research this way and adults should be more sophisticated.

[edit] Exceptions

If the topic under research is Wikipedia itself, then Wikipedia is the preferred source of information. For topics such as Wikipedia policies and policymaking, Wikipedia language edition growth, and Wikipedia editorial collaboration Wikipedia is not a tertiary source but a primary source.

If the topic under research is unavailable through other means, then Wikipedia might be an acceptable source. Wikipedia includes articles on relatively obscure topics that might not be covered in much depth elsewhere on the Internet or at a typical library. So a line referenced article such as Siege of Compiègne could be the best information available to a particular researcher. Whenever this situation emerges, the best course of action is to report the dearth of sources in advance (to a teacher, professor, or boss) and request permission to cite Wikipedia.

[edit] How to cite Wikipedia anyway

As of this writing Wikipedia has 1,439,949 articles. That number may be wildly inaccurate by the time a given reader sees it. Researchers who do cite Wikipedia should include a reference date and preferably a precise time stamp from the page history. In the time it took to type this paragraph the number of articles at Wikipedia changed to 1,439,954.