Wikipedia:Avoid self-references

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This page is part of the Manual of Style, and is considered a guideline for Wikipedia. The consensus of many editors formed the conventions described here, and Wikipedia articles should heed these guidelines. Before making any major changes to these guidelines, please use the discussion page to ensure that your changes reflect consensus.
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This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia's free content is reused in many places, online and off. Don't assume that the reader is reading Wikipedia, or indeed any website.

Avoid self-references within Wikipedia articles to the Wikipedia project, such as:

This Wikipedia article discusses ...
Free content projects, such as this website ...
While Wikipedia is not a dictionary, ... (in an article about a certain term)
Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers (see Wikipedia:Spoiler warning for alternative text)

Such self-references are entirely acceptable on talk pages or in the Wikipedia namespace, but they are inappropriate in articles for two reasons. The first is that self-references are often considered disruptive in an encyclopedia because they distract from the topic at hand. A secondary concern is that self-references limit the use of Wikipedia as an open source encyclopedia suitable for forking, as permitted by our license. Put simply, this policy is about remembering that the goal of Wikipedia is to create an encyclopedia, not merely to perpetuate itself, so the articles produced should be useful even outside the context of the project used to create them.

Contents

[edit] Think about print

Don't forget, we want to make the creation of a print version of Wikipedia as easy as possible, so try to use terms such as "this article" as opposed to "this website", and certainly don't use terms such as "click here" (which make no sense when using a screen reader, for instance). You may also find it helpful to imagine you're reading the article in another encyclopedia.

[edit] Community and website feature references

While we're often inclined to mention the Wikipedia community that we are all part of, as well as the website features we use in creating the articles, these confuse readers of derivative works. Unless substantially part of the article topic, do not refer to the fact that the page can be edited or any Wikipedia project page or process, specialized Wikipedia jargon (e.g. "POV" in place of "biased"), or any MediaWiki interface link in the sidebar or along the top of the screen. Articles are part of an encyclopedia, not part of the Wikipedia project being used to create them. However, there are exceptions. An article which is still in its initial development or under dispute often will include tags such as {{stub}}, and {{npov}} to help editors further develop the article, and the text in these templates include self-references.

[edit] Neutral references

References which exist in a way which assumes the reader is using an encyclopedia without reference to the specific encyclopedia (Wikipedia), or the manner of access (online), are acceptable. For instance, the article on Kobe Bryant's accuser, before her identification, said that "Due to concerns over privacy the name of the alleged victim is not being included in this article or at this time." That is a reference which makes sense on a mirror or a fork, makes sense in print, and makes sense in a copy of Wikipedia which contains only the article space. A more common example is the disambiguation message This article is about X. For Y, see Z. and all of the "See also" links.

[edit] Writing about Wikipedia itself

Wikipedia can, of course, write about Wikipedia, but context is important. If you read about Shakespeare's works, you are not interested in reading about Wikipedia's policies or conventions. If, however, you read about online communities, the article may well discuss Wikipedia as an example, in a neutral tone, without specifically implying that the article in question is being read on — or is a part of — Wikipedia. If, in this framework, you link from an article to a specific Wikipedia page, use external link style so the link will make sense in any context.

The following are some examples where such links can be useful:

[edit] Articles are about their subjects

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, so our articles are about their subjects; they are not about the articles themselves. If publicity regarding an article is significant enough to include in Wikipedia, the information would not be included in that article unless it was relevant to the topic of the article itself. For example, a discussion of Stephen Colbert's call for vandalism of the Elephant article might be appropriate for the articles on the Colbert Report or Wikipedia, but not for the article on elephants—the incident, although widely publicized, had nothing to do with the actual animal. A very rare exception to this is the article on John Seigenthaler, Sr., because the media attention surrounding his Wikipedia entry is now a notable event in his public life.

[edit] In the Template and Category namespaces

Limited use of self-references are sometimes found in the Template namespace and the Category namespace, such as with disambiguation and stub notices. Expanding this to other areas is not encouraged due to the need of third party users to either delete those templates or modify them to remove the Wikipedia references.

When forced to use templates like this, you should use them in a way such that the article still makes sense when the template is removed, in order to facilitate automated removal.

Wikipedia project coordination pages should be under Category:Wikipedia administration, not in categories which contain main-namespace articles by topic. (A small number of articles about Wikipedia are in the mainstream categories, and this is OK.) User pages may be categorized under Category:Wikipedians, but not under Category:People.

[edit] Examples of self-references

The following are some examples of self-references in Wikipedia's article namespace. They should at least be acknowledged or marked as self-references but not necessarily be deleted as they serve their purpose here on Wikipedia.

Mark Twain probably said it best: "Every generalization is dangerous, especially this one."

[edit] Self-reference tools

The self-reference template Template:Selfref provide a way to contain all the self-references as tags. This gives the ability to programmatically remove all such references or transform them into external links. Thus, the end product can have all of its self-references removed automatically for users such as forks and mirrors.

In cases where a Wikipedia page should be mentioned on Wikipedia itself (for instance, at Wikipedia), and this link should be kept on mirrors, the format {{srlink|link}} can be used to write the link as external rather than internal, to prevent it breaking in mirrors. For instance: Main Page as opposed to Main Page.

[edit] See also

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