Wikipedia articles should use reliable published sources. This page provides guidance about how to identify these. The two policy pages that discuss the need to use sources are No original research and Verifiability.
If you can provide useful information to Wikipedia, please do so, but bear in mind that edits for which no reliable references are provided may be removed by any editor. The burden to provide such references is on the person adding material to an article.
What follows is a description of Wikipedia's best practices. Many articles may fall short of this standard until one or more editors devote time and effort to fact-checking and reference-running. (See Reliable sources#Evaluating sources.) In the meantime, readers can still benefit from your contributions, bearing in mind that unsourced edits, or edits relying on inappropriate sources, may be challenged at any time.
There are many ways in which factual errors can be introduced into reports. Keep in mind that many articles are about characterizing the various factions in a dispute. This means that you will be looking for reliable published reports of people's opinions.
Please note the following terms:
When reporting facts, Wikipedia articles should Cite sources .Jimmy Wales: "I do agree *" target="_blank" >one of our goals will be to provide more articles with more extensive information about "where to learn more", i.e. cite original research, etc., as much as we can." ("[http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/28/1351230&tid=146&tid=95&tid=11 Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds", Slashdot interview, July 2004) Wikipedia is a tertiary source. Wikipedia cannot cite itself as a source—that would be a Avoid self-references. There is a wealth of reliable information in tertiary sources such as the Encyclopædia Britannica. Note that unsigned Encyclopædia Britannica, World Book, and Encarta articles are written by staff, who may not be experts, and the articles may therefore not have the same level of credibility, but they are regarded as reliable sources for Wikipedia's purposes. When wikipedians have the ambition to write a better encyclopedia entry than those extant,Jimbo Wales: "Our goal is to get to Britannica quality, or better." ("Internet encyclopaedias go head to head" in Nature, December 2005) it does not suffice to rely on the content of such tertiary sources. Therefore, in general, as primary sources are also to be treated with caution (see above), secondary sources are the stock material on which Wikipedia articles depend for their references.
When reporting that an opinion is held by a particular individual or group, the best citation will be to a direct quote, citing the source of the quote in full after the sentence, using a Harvard reference, a footnote, or an embedded link. See CITE for more details. If there is text, audio, or video available of someone expressing the opinion directly, you may include or transcribe an excerpt, which is allowed under fair use.
It is always appropriate to ask other editors to produce their sources. The burden of evidence lies with the editor who has made the edit in question, and any unsourced material may be removed by any editor. However, some editors may object if you remove material without giving people a chance to find a source, particularly when the material is not obviously wrong, absurd, or harmful. Instead of removing such material immediately, editors are encouraged to move it to the talk page, or to place the template after the disputed word or sentence, or to tag the article by adding or at the top of the page. See Verifiability and No original research, which are policy, and Avoid weasel words.
Use sources who have postgraduate degrees or demonstrable published expertise in the field they are discussing. The more reputable ones are affiliated with academic institutions. The most reputable have written textbooks in their field: these authors can be expected to have a broad, authoritative grasp of their subject. In general, college textbooks are frequently revised and try to be authoritative. High school and middle school textbooks, however, do not try to be authoritative and they are subject to political approval.
Also ask yourself:
See No original research and Verifiability for more information.
Because conscious and unconscious biases are not always self-evident, you shouldn't necessarily be satisfied with a single source. Find another one and cross-check. If multiple independent sources agree and they have either no strong reason to be biased, or their biases are at cross purposes, then you may have a reliable account.
However, bear in mind that we only report what reliable publications publish, although of course editors should seek to use the most authoritative sources. In accordance with Wikipedia's No original research policy, we do not add our own opinion.
Even given the same primary sources, different analysts may come to different conclusions about the facts being reported. In practice, many secondary sources find and use different primary sources in the course of their research. Conscious biases, unconscious biases, and errors are not always self-evident. The best way to expose them is to cross-check with another secondary source.
Publications with teams of fact-checkers, reporters, editors, lawyers, and managers — like the New York Times or The Times of London — are likely to be reliable, and are regarded as reputable sources for the purposes of Wikipedia. At the other end of the reliability scale lie personal websites, blogs, bulletin boards, and Usenet posts, which are typically not acceptable as sources.
Note that Wikipedia itself does not currently meet the reliability guidelines; however, nothing in this guideline is meant to contravene the associated guideline: Build the web. Wikilink freely.
Exceptions to this may be when a well-known, professional researcher writing within his field of expertise, or a well-known professional journalist, has produced self-published material. In some cases, these may be acceptable as sources, so long as their work has been previously published by credible, third-party publications, and they are writing under their own names, and not a pseudonym.
However, editors should exercise caution for two reasons: first, if the information on the professional researcher's blog (or self-published equivalent) is really worth reporting, someone else will have done so; secondly, the information has been self-published, which means it has not been subject to any independent form of fact-checking.
However, we should avoid relying on self-published material, such as a vanity-press book or a personal website, as a sole source. That is particularly true when the subject is controversial, and the self-publisher has no professional or academic standing.
That is, they should not be used as sources of information about a person or topic other than the owner of the website, or author of the book. The reason personal websites are not used as secondary sources — and as primary sources only with great caution and not as a sole source if the subject is controversial — is that they are usually created by unknown individuals who have no one checking their work. They may be uninformed, misled, pushing an agenda, sloppy, relying on rumor and suspicion, or even insane; or they may be intelligent, careful people sharing their knowledge with the world. It is impossible to know which is the case. Visiting a stranger's personal website is often the online equivalent of reading an unattributed flyer on a lamp post, and should be treated accordingly.
If you find a print source that is out of copyright or that is available on compatible licensing terms, add it to Wikisource and link to it there (in addition to the normal scholarly citation). Many significant out-of-copyright books have already been put online by other projects.
Fact checking and reference-running can be time consuming. Your local public or academic library may not have the work cited by an article on its shelves. Often you can ask for a book through interlibrary loan, but this can sometimes take several weeks to do. Fortunately, new tools are now available online to make this work easier. Services such as Google Books, Amazon.com’s “search inside!” , the Internet Archive’s Million Book Project and the University of Michigan's Making of America allow you to search the full text of thousands of books. In addition, many similar subscription-based services may be available to though your public, college, university or graduate school libraries.
To check on facts and citations in Wikipedia, these databases are powerful tools. You can search them the same way that you do in an internet search. Enter the author in quotation marks and the title in quotation marks. If the book is in the database already, the search engine will find it. If it isn’t, you may discover another work that discusses the book you seek. For subjects, enter as many terms as you can recall. The engines will display a list of pages that contain these terms. Often you will be able to verify the fact you are checking or discover a significant point of view not represented in the Wikipedia article.
When you use one of these services, be sure to gather all the information you can find by selecting links such as “About the Book.” You should be able to assemble a citation in exactly the same way you do with a print publication. If there is an ISBN for the book, be sure to include it. Use the ISBN to link to the book, since several of these sites display only selected materials from the books they have online.
Hint: Services such as Google Books often have poorly OCR-ed text. This is especially true for names and words with diacritics where searches often come up with nothing. A way around this is to search for common OCR mistakes.
The Wikipedia special page Book sources will enable readers to click on the ISBN number of your book citation and search a variety of library databases and retailers to find it. For example the citation:
Keep in mind that translations are subject to error, whether performed by a Wikipedia editor or a professional, published translator. In principle, readers should have the opportunity to verify for themselves what the original material actually said, that it was published by a credible source, and that it was translated correctly.
Therefore, when the original material is in a language other than English:
Scholars doing research publish their results in books and journal articles. The books are usually published by university presses or by commercial houses like W.W. Norton and Greenwood which emulate the university press standards. Reputable history books and journal articles always include footnotes and bibliographies giving the sources used in great detail. Most journals contain book reviews by scholars that evaluate the quality of new books, and usually summarize some of their new ideas. The American Historical Review (all fields of history) and Journal of American History (US history) each publish 1000 or more full-length reviews a year. Many of the major journals are online, as far back as 1885, especially through JSTOR.org. A good book or article will spell out the historiographical debates that are ongoing, and alert readers to other major studies.
On many topics, there are different interpretive schools which use the same documents and facts but use different frameworks and come to different conclusions. Useful access points include: scholar.google.com and books.google.com, and (through libraries) ABC-CLIO’s two abstract services, American: History and Life (for journal articles and book reviews dealing with the US and Canada), and Historical Abstracts (for the rest of the world.) Research libraries will hold paper guides to authoritative sources. The most useful is The American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature, edited by Mary Beth Norton and Pamela Gerardi 2 vol (1995), which is an annotated bibliography of authoritative sources in all fields of history.
There are many other sources of historical information, but their authority varies. A recent trend is a proliferation of specialized encyclopedias on historical topics. These are edited by experts who commission scholars to write the articles, and then review each article for quality control. They can be considered authoritative for Wikipedia. General encyclopedias, like the Encyclopedia Britannica or Encarta, sometimes have authoritative signed articles written by specialists and including references. However, unsigned entries are written in batches by freelancers and must be used with caution.
College textbooks are updated every few years, are evaluated by many specialists, and usually try to keep abreast of the scholarship, but they are often without footnotes and usually do not spell out the historiographical debates. Textbooks at the K-12 level do not try to be authoritative and should be avoided by Wikipedia editors. Every place has guide books, which usually contain a capsule history of the area, but the great majority do not pretend to be authoritative. On many historical topics there are memoirs and oral histories that specialists consult with caution, for they are filled with stories that people wish to remember — and usually recall without going back to the original documentation. Editors should use them with caution.
The general public mostly gets its history from novels, films, TV shows, or tour guides at various sites. These sources are full of rumor and gossip and false or exaggerated tales. They tend to present rosy-colored histories in which the well-known names are portrayed heroically. Almost always editors can find much more authoritative sources.
The fact that a statement is published in a refereed journal does not make it true. Even a well-designed experiment or study can produce flawed results or fall victim to deliberate fraud. (See the Retracted article on neurotoxicity of ecstasy and the Schön affair.)
Honesty and the policies of N and NOR demand that we present the prevailing "scientific consensus". Polling a group of experts in the field wouldn't be practical for many editors but fortunately there is an easier way. The scientific consensus can be found in recent, authoritative review articles or textbooks and some forms of monographs.
There is sometimes no single prevailing view because the available evidence does not yet point to a single answer. Because Wikipedia not only aims to be accurate, but also useful, it tries to explain the theories and empirical justification for each school of thought, with reference to published sources. Editors must not, however, create arguments themselves in favor of, or against, any particular theory or position. See No original research, which is policy. Although significant-minority views are welcome in Wikipedia, the views of tiny minorities need not be reported. (See Neutral Point of View.)
Make readers aware of any uncertainty or controversy. A well-referenced article will point to specific journal articles or specific theories proposed by specific researchers.
What can a popular-press article on scientific research provide? Often, the most useful thing is the name of the head researcher involved in a project, and the name of his or her institution. For instance, a newspaper article quoting Joe Smith of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution regarding whales' response to sonar gives you a strong suggestion of where to go to find more: look up his work on the subject. Rather than citing the newspaper article, cite his published papers.
In general, journals published by prominent scientific societies are of better quality than those produced by commercial publishers. The American Association for the Advancement of Science's journal Science is among the most highly regarded; while the journals Nature and Cell are notable non-society publications.
Keep in mind that even a reputable journal may occasionally post a retraction of an experimental result. Articles may be selected on the grounds that they are interesting or highly promising, not merely because they seem reliable.
Researchers may publish on arXiv for different reasons: to establish priority in a competitive field, to make available newly developed methods to the scientific community while the publication is undergoing peer-review (a specially lengthy process in mathematics), and sometimes to publish a paper that has been rejected from several journals or to bypass peer-review for publications of dubious quality. Editors should be aware that preprints in such collections, like those in the arXiv collection, may or may not be accepted by the journal for which they were written — in some cases they are written solely for the arXiv and are never submitted for publication. Similarly, material presented at a conference may not merit publication in a scientific journal.
See Misuse of statistics, Opinion poll, and Statistical survey for common errors and abuses.
When discussing legal texts, it is in general better to quote from the text, or quote from reputable jurists, than to quote from newspaper reports, although newspaper reports in good newspapers are acceptable too. The journalist who wrote the paper may not be trained as a lawyer, although s/he may have access to a wider variety of legal experts than many lawyers do, so judge the quality of the report according to how well that journalist, or that newspaper, has covered legal issues in the past.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the
"Wikipedia:Reliable sources".
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