Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a reliable source
 | This is an explanatory supplement to the Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources guideline. This page is intended to provide 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 in a nutshell: Do not use a Wikipedia article as a source for another Wikipedia article, even when describing Wikipedia. |
Wikipedia is not a reliable source. Wikipedia editors try their very hardest to maintain this site. Multiple measures, such as IP-bans and article protection, are used to prevent vandalism of this site and maintain its credibility. But Wikipedia can be edited by anyone at any time. This means that any information it contains at any particular time could be vandalism, a work in progress, or just plain wrong. Biographies of living persons, subjects that happen to be in the news, and politically or culturally contentious topics are especially vulnerable to these issues. Edits on Wikipedia that are in error may eventually be fixed. However, because Wikipedia is a volunteer run project, it cannot monitor every contribution all of the time. There are many errors that may remain unnoticed for days, weeks, months, or even years. Therefore, Wikipedia should not be considered a definitive source in and of itself.
The same applies to Wikipedia's sister projects, as well as websites that mirror or use it as a source themselves, and printed books or other material derived primarily or entirely from Wikipedia articles.
- Wikipedia generally uses reliable secondary sources, which 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 mirror Wikipedia can be used as sources, because this is 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 source to support a statement about Wikipedia (while avoiding undue emphasis on Wikipedia's role or views, and inappropriate self-reference).
See also
- Wikipedia:citogenesis
- Wikipedia:Wikipedia is a tertiary source
- Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Self-references to avoid
- Wikipedia:Verifiability#Wikipedia and sources that mirror or use it
- Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources
- Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought
- Wikipedia:Wikipedia is wrong
External links
- Does Wikipedia Suck? on teaching students to evaluate sources
