Wikipedia:Avoid self-references

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 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 Copyrights. 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 it.

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 Wikipedia page outside the main namespace, use external link style to allow the link to work also in a site with a copy of the main namespace content.

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.

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. In particular, do not refer to the fact that the page can be edited, do not refer to any Wikipedia project page or process, do not use specialized Wikipedia jargon (e.g. "POV" in place of "biased"), and do not refer to any link in the sidebar or along the top of the screen, such as the talk page, What links here, or history. Remember, articles are part of an encyclopedia, not part of the Wikipedia project being used to create them.

However, there are exceptions to this. In particular, an article which is still in its initial development or under dispute often will include tags such as , and to help editors further develop the article, and the text in these templates include self-references. Try, however, to limit such self-references, even in templates.

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.

In the Template and Category namespaces

Limited use of self-references are sometimes found in the Template namespace and the Categories, 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.

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.

Articles that self-reference
- Any article in the article namespace that links to one in the Wikipedia namespace
- Any article in the article namespace that redirects to one in the Wikipedia namespace (except the shortcuts in the "pseudo" WP: namespace)
- Articles that mention or are named "article" rather than "topic" and may also refer to Wikipedia itself. For example, "List of articles" rather than "List of topics".
Categories that self-reference
- Category:Wikipedia and its subcategories in the article namespace
- User categories such as Category:User en and Category:Wikipedians
Use of templates in the article namespace that self-reference because they link to articles in the user, talk, or Wikipedia namespace or that are special articles.
- Various Template messages/Stubs
- NPOV, long NPOV
- Disputed, TotallyDisputed
- Afd, Cfd, Rfd
- Merge, Mergeto, Mergefrom
- Disambig (Also the text only makes sense online)
- Wrongtitle
- Fact
- Uncategorized
- Templates used to advertise Sister projects and other versions of itself

Self-reference tools

The self-reference template Selfref provide a way to contain all the self-references as tags. This gives the ability to programatically 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.