Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a reliable source
This is an explanatory essay about the Wikipedia:Reliable sources guideline. This page provides additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. |
This page is about using Wikipedia as a citation in another Wikipedia article and not about using Wikipedia in general. For critiques of Wikipedia's reliability for readers, see Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is not so great. For information on citing Wikipedia as a source in an academic setting, see Wikipedia:Citing Wikipedia. |
This page in a nutshell: Do not use a Wikipedia article as a source for another Wikipedia article. |
Wikipedia is not a reliable source for citations elsewhere on Wikipedia. As a
The Signpost
, and non-English Wikipedias.
The same applies to Wikipedia's
WP:CIRCULAR
for guidance.
- Wikipedia pages often cite reliable secondary sources that vet data from primary sources. If the information on another Wikipedia page (which you want to cite as the source) has a primary or secondary source, you should be able to cite that primary or secondary source and eliminate the middleman (or "middle-page" in this case).
- Always be careful of what you read: it might not be consistently accurate.
- Neither articles on Wikipedia nor websites that circular sourcing.
- An exception to this is when Wikipedia is being discussed in an article, which may cite an article, guideline, discussion, statistic or other content from Wikipedia or a sister project as a primary sourceto support a statement about Wikipedia (while avoiding undue emphasis on Wikipedia's role or views and inappropriate self-referencing).
Articles are only as good as the
user pages
as benchmarks. Of course, Wikipedia makes no representation as to their truth. Further, Wikipedia is collaborative by nature, and individual articles may be the work of one or many contributors over varying periods. Articles vary in quality and content, widely and unevenly, and also depending on the quality of sources (and their writers, editors, and publishers) that are referenced and/or linked. Circumstances may have changed since the edits were added.
Occasionally, inexperienced editors may unintentionally cite the Wikipedia article about a publication instead of the publication itself; in these cases, fix the citation instead of removing it. Although citing Wikipedia as a source is against policy, content can be copied between articles with proper attribution; see
WP:COPYWITHIN
for instructions.
See also
- Reliability of Wikipedia
- Wikipedia:General disclaimer
- Wikipedia:List of citogenesis incidents
- Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Self-references to avoid
- Wikipedia:Verifiability § Wikipedia and sources that mirror or use it
- Wikipedia:Wikipedia is a tertiary source
- Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought
- Wikipedia:Wikipedia is wrong