Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a reliable source

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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.

  1. 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).
  2. Always be careful of what you read: it might not be consistently accurate.
  3. Neither articles on Wikipedia nor websites that
    circular sourcing
    .
  4. 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 source
    to 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