Everyone always says: “NEVER use Wikipedia as a source!” But, I take a rather different approach: I say YES! However, follow my advice at your peril. There is more to this debate than meets first the eye.

Wikipedia holds a unique position as an academic source, it is both loved and loathed - a superposition of diametric opposition, much like Schrödinger’s world-famous cat. This may sound odd to many people, as the common view is that Wikipedia is a terrible source that should be avoided at all costs! But, the fact of the matter is much more complex and something I hope to explain just a little about here.

Edited by Everyone, Everywhere

The usual argument against using Wikipedia is that it can be edited by anyone on the internet, meaning that ill-meaning schoolkids and malicious adults can modify articles and present whatever they want, with relative authority. My favourite example of this (which, fortunately, I do not believe ever happened) is editing the article of Queen Elizabeth II to say that she was a potato, an example shared by my primary school teacher - school education really has changed over the years…

Whilst that argument may well be true, it does not hold water. Any person with a shred of intelligence would be able to sort fact from fiction in the potato-ey case of poor Queen Elizabeth, however, it should be noted that more devious changes could be and are frequently made. So, how do we sort academic fact from academic fiction? Citations, page grading, and version histories.

Pages, Articles, and Talks

Wikipedia is a digital encyclopaedia comprising of a system of linked webpages (pages). However, whilst this structure sounds simple, there are some important distinctions to be made before we begin our wholesale discussion:

Articles

The pages most people refer to on Wikipedia are articles, which they then indiscriminately call ‘pages’ - much to the annoyance of Wikipedians, the editors and community of Wikipedia supporters.

Talks

The pages which are almost more important to Wikipedians are talks, which are where editors and the community discuss proposed changes to articles and points for improvement.

The two page types are both accessible from the same location: the top navigation bar.

Citations

Citations are what academics use to show what content (websites, books, etc.) they have referenced when writing and producing a work. Wikipedia is no different:

Go and look up your favourite academic Wikipedia page, I will wait… (my favourite is Perchlorate, I will leave you to guess why) Got it? Good.

Now, on the page, check for references. Within the main page content, they appear as superscript numbers^{[like this!]}, which then link to full citations at the bottom of the page. The most common things to reference on a Wikipedia page are facts, figures, and quotes - although almost everything on a Wikipedia page is a statement produced from reading some source or other!

As a small note, you will not find any Wikipedia articles that cite other Wikipedia articles - if that sways your opinion.

In my opinion (here we go…), a good page should have at least two references per paragraph, so the longer the page, the longer you should expect the references section to be. If you plan on referencing Wikipedia, make sure that the section you are using is properly referenced - each point or fact should have its own reference.

Refereeing

Checking the references and content of a source is called refereeing. All academic papers and texts released through scientific journals are refereed prior to publishing through a system known as peer review; during this process, an expert reviews the content of a preprint - a paper released prior to publishing - and provides advice. For experimental papers, the experiments are performed by independent research groups to verify the results.

Wikipedia is setup so that anyone on the internet can act as a referee, correcting information and adding missing knowledge. This means that articles can become both detailed and highly reliable as many people have approved their content

Page Grading

All articles on Wikipedia are graded and assigned a class. You can view a list of the classes here. For each class, the moderators of Wikipedia provide a detailed outline of their meanings and examples. This, as you might have guessed, is extremely useful as it provides an unambiguous opinion on page ‘completeness’ and accuracy.

But, where are these classes? For top class articles, the class symbol is displayed at the top right of the article page. However, for all articles ranked at a class B or below, the class is not displayed on the article page; you will, instead, need to visit the talk page for the article, which lists the article class in the yellow infobox at the top of the page.

Higher class articles have both more references and a greater amount of content (i.e. increased page length), usually an indication of a better quality and reliability. However, the system can be cheated to artificially improve an article’s class, so, always check for yourself.

As a rule, articles which I deem suitable for referencing usually have a class of B or above, but, suitability is a matter of taste and will vary from article-to-article.

Wikipedia Needs YOU

Have you ever come across a Wikipedia article that did not hold all the answers? Or even one that was wrong? You could have been the person to fix the problem.

As Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, anywhere, if you ever spot something that is wrong, you too can edit Wikipedia and put it right. A good place to start is the how-to guide for editing, which provides a simple introduction to the world of Wikipedia editing.

Contributing to a large project like Wikipedia is a hugely rewarding experience, and one with hardly any risks! Should you do anything wrong, there is always a large community of Wikipedians to put you on the right path.

Version Histories

In the top navigation bar, a number of tools are available; everything from edit mode to a PDF download option are selectable - as is the view history option. Every edit that is made to an article is documented on the revision history page and lists - in order - the edit time, user responsible, article size, and edit summary. So, how can this be used?

That is a bit more complex than with the two other fact-checking methods as there are a few warning signs to look out for, rather than a simple threshold system. I recommend checking:

1. Authorship: Check if one user has made a disproportionate amount of article edits, this could be a sign that the article has not been sufficiently refereed by our beloved Wikipedians.
2. Size: Are there any large edits? On the revision history page, changes of over 500 characters are in bold - look out for these. Large changes are significant, so beware!
3. Anonymity: Changes made to articles by non-users are labelled using IP addresses, so if you see a random string of numbers (e.g. 185.15.59.224 - Wikipedia’s IP address), this might be a sign that someone does not want to be associated with the edit.
4. Summaries: As a rule, always scan through edit summaries. Of particular interest are summaries that do not match their edit size, say, for example, a ‘link change’ of 500 characters!

Citing Citations

Some well-meaning students get into a particularly unsavoury habit of citing the sources Wikipedia provides for the information they reference - this is worse than citing Wikipedia itself.

You see, just because something is cited on Wikipedia does not mean that it is a) correct or b) relevant. The source may not even contain the information cited! So, what to do instead?

If you are banned from citing Wikipedia, use it as a base for relevant information and read through it’s references instead of the article itself. Then, as you know the content of the references and what you have used, you can cite them without worry.

My Opinion

Closing thoughts: I have highlighted above the techniques I use when vetting Wikipedia articles for quality; make no mistake, this is not a complete guide and I am not responsible for you getting into trouble with your university professor (I respect them and think they are mostly right).

The modern establishment has decided it is bad practice to cite Wikipedia for a rather good reason, because it is highly challenging to teach whole cohorts of students - and indeed professionals - how to reliably use and cite Wikipedia. There are just too many variables involved.

However, with everything said and done, I do use Wikipedia and hold it in high regard as a project with high standards and trustworthy open standards. My personal ideology for Wikipedia is as follows; for:

1. Academic work: Each Wikipedia article must be fully vetted for accuracy and secondary sources (Wikipedia references) cross-checked for reliability in line with an extensive list of criteria and standards (kept private and frequently updated). Articles must be included in bibliographies with timestamps and edit-specific links according to the Wikipedia citation guidelines.
2. Non-academic work: Information used from Wikipedia should be checked against at least two other independent sources not cited by Wikipedia (usually high-ranking search engine results). Stating that Wikipedia was used as a source is all that is necessary.

As you can probably see, my academic standards are a lot higher! That is because my non-academic work consists of casual-style blog posts written in my spare time - my passion projects - which I do not deem as requiring quite as rigorous of a vetting process.

So as not to further endorse Wikipedia as a source I have chosen not to publish my ‘criteria and standards’ list.

Here is the section you have all been waiting for:

How To Cite Wikipedia

Please read Wikipedia’s how-to guide for citing for both a comprehensive guide and detailed disclaimer.

Wikipedia handily provides a ‘Cite this page’ link in the tools section (in the top navigation bar) which supplies a pre-composed bibliography entry for most major citation styles alongside a BibTeX entry. As these entries follow Wikipedia’s guidelines, they are the most convenient and ‘correct’ way to cite articles.

I would recommend adding notes alongside bibliography entries to indicate which article sections you have used.

This blog post is to be referenced whenever I cite Wikipedia within a work as my modus operandi - it does not and never will constitute academic advice and nor does it represent standard practice within any academic community.

Sources

Picture composition arranged from Wikipedia:

• Wikipedia-logo-v2.svg Version 1 by Nohat (concept by Paullusmagnus); Wikimedia., CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Facts from Wikipedia, opinions by Neo Skinner.

Legal

Neo Skinner cannot be held accountable for the results of following the recommendations listed above, this blog post does not claim to be a guide of any form. The terms ‘Wikipedia’ and ‘Wikipedians’ are intellectual property of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation.