To ensure that all Wikipedia content is verifiable, Wikipedia provides a means for anyone to question an uncited claim.
This is an information page. It is not one of Wiki's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wiki: Verifiability policy. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting. |
A complete version of the documentation for this template is provided at Template:Citation needed. If you are new to editing and instead just need a general overview of how sources work, see the referencing for beginners help page. |
If your work has been tagged, please provide a reliable source for the statement, and discuss if needed.
You can add a citation by selecting from the drop-down menu at the top of the editing box. In markup, you can add a citation manually using ref tags. There are also more elaborate ways to cite sources.
In wiki markup, you can question an uncited claim by inserting a simple {{Citation needed}}
tag, or a more comprehensive {{Citation needed|reason=Your explanation here|date=April 2024}}
. Alternatively, {{fact}}
and {{cn}}
will produce the same result. These all display as:
Example: 87 percent of statistics are made up on the spot.[citation needed]
For information on adding citations in articles, see Help:Referencing for beginners. For information on when to remove this template messages, see Help:Maintenance template removal.
A "citation needed" tag is a request for another editor to supply a source for the tagged fact: a form of communication between members of a collaborative editing community. It is never, in itself, an "improvement" of an article. Though readers may be alerted by a "citation needed" that a particular statement is not supported, and even doubted by some, many readers don't fully understand the community's processes. Not all tags get addressed in a timely manner, staying in place for months or years, forming an ever-growing Wikipedia backlog—this itself can be a problem. Best practice recommends the following:
Before adding a tag, at least consider the following alternatives, one of which may prove much more constructive:
There are 518,056 articles with "Citation needed" statements. You can browse the whole list of these articles at Category:All articles with unsourced statements.
Frequently the authors of statements do not return to Wikipedia to support the statement with citations, so other Wikipedia editors have to do work checking those statements. With 518,056 statements that need WP:Verification, sometimes it's hard to choose which article to work on. The tool Citation Hunt makes that easier by suggesting random articles, which you can sort by topical category membership.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia English article Wiki:Citation needed, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license ("CC BY-SA 3.0"); additional terms may apply (view authors). Content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
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