Student Resources
Critical Approaches to Wikipedia, Information, and the Collaborative Construction of Knowledge

General Wikipedia Help

Wikipedia:Tutorial is a good place to start. Also Help:Contents. If you can't find what you need, you can contact those at Wikipedia:Help desk or contact me.

Wikitext / WikiMarkup

The Editing Wikitext Wikibook.

Citing Sources

The Basics

Per the verifiability policy, any statement that is or could reasonably be contested should be accompanied by one or more reliable sources to back it up. Likewise, all sources quoted, referenced, or otherwise utilized in the writing of an article must be properly cited. There are a couple ways to do this, but the citation style should be consistent throughout each article.

If contributing to an existing page, use whatever style is already in place or start a discussion on the talk page explaining why you'd like to change it.

General Information about Citing Sources on Wikipedia

In-Text Citations

Although Wikipedia does not specifically mandate it, footnotes are preferred--and far more common--than parenthetical citations in-text. For most people, this is probably the biggest difference between citing sources on Wikipedia and doing so in an academic research paper. Footnotes are handled through the <ref></ref> tags and in almost all cases should be placed at the end of a sentence after the ending punctuation.

What goes between the <ref> and </ref> tags is either a full or short citation, but use of one or the other should be consistent throughout the article.

A full citation is equivalent to what you would see in a Works Cited list: it should be formatted in a standardized citation style like APA or MLA, all citations should follow the same citation style, and it should provide as much information as possible to allow a reader to find the source (a hyperlink is ideal).
A short citation is equivalent to what you would see in a parenthetical in-text citation, the exact details of which depend on the citation style you choose for the article (APA, MLA, etc.). It contains basic information that can be cross-referenced with a separate list of sources.

Reference List

The kind of reference list you use partly depends on the kind of in-text citations you've chosen.

If you've used full citations in the text, you simply need a separate section called "References" at the end of the article which will contain all of the full citations.
If you've used short citations in the text, you will need two separate sections at the end of the article:
1. a "Works Cited," "Bibliography," or "References" section which will contain a list of full citations (kind of like a Works Cited section of a research paper). None of the footnotes link to this section.
2. a "Notes" or "References" section that contains all of the short citations. It is this section the footnotes will link to, which the reader can then cross-reference with the other section above.

Examples of Articles Using the "Full Citations with References" Method

Examples of Articles Using the "Short Citations with Bibliography and References" Method

Wikimarkup

The easiest way to figure out how references are managed is to see how they've been done in the past. Edit a page that already uses them (preferably a Featured or Good article) and compare the wikimarkup inside to how the page looks.

Add a reference by using the <ref></ref> tags. Just put your citation in between them and it will appear in the references list at the bottom.

If one doesn't exist, you'll need to include the tag <references /> at the bottom of the page in a separate section called something like "Notes" or "References." In some cases, you'll use the {{reflist}} template instead, but it usually isn't necessary unless you have separate footnote groups (see below).

If you want to reuse the same source, give the tag a name. For example, <ref name="McLuhan">McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media.</ref>. Later, if you simply put <ref name="McLuhan"></ref> it will refer back to the citation above.

Other Uses for Footnotes

What if you want to use a footnote to explain something, give context, or another purpose other than for citing a source? For this you use groups. The Help:Footnotes page contains instructions for how to do this, along with several other possibilities for dealing with footnotes.

Categories, Templates, and Other Pages about Articles with Sourcing Issues

Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons
- based on Category:Unreferenced BLPs
Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced articles
- based on Category:Articles lacking sources
Category:Articles with sourcing issues - contains several subcategories for different kinds of sourcing issues (and article pages relevant to each)
Category:All articles needing additional references - pages are automatically listed here when someone adds one of the following templates to an article or section: Template:Refimprove, Template:Refimprovesect, Template:One source, or Template:Unreferenced section
Category:Articles needing additional references - pages from Category:All articles needing additional references broken down into the month and year the template was placed on the page
Category:Articles lacking sources - pages with Template:Unreferenced are automatically listed here. It is specifically for articles that don't site any sources.

Wikipedia Norms, Etiquette, and Style

Most policies and guidelines can be derived from The Five Pillars.
Citing sources and WP:Verifiability
Notability
Neutral Point of View
WP:Manual of Style

Finding Articles to Write

Wikipedia:Requested articles - categorized list of articles people have requested
find an appropriate WikiProject or WikiPortal, specialized groups or content hubs
- Directory of WikiProjects
- List of portals
Wikipedia:Opentask may be a good place to check, but keep in mind most of what you see here is about cleaning up existing articles
Wikipedia:Most wanted articles lists the most commonly linked to pages that don't exist
Category:Stub categories is a categorized list of stubs (very short articles that could use elaboration)
- Category:Stubs is used less these days and can be unwieldy, but you can sometimes find stubs here that aren't yet categorized
Wikipedia:Most wanted stubs functions like the Most Wanted Articles list, but is for stubs not non-existent pages
Wikipedia:WikiProject Requested articles

Featured Articles and Good Articles

Featured articles are Wikipedia articles that have gone through a rigorous peer review process and held to a strict set of criteria. They are well-written, comprehensive, well-researched, neutral, stable, appropriate in length, and adhere to Wikipedia style guidelines. They are supplemented by media, refer to several diverse sources which are properly and consistently formatting, and do not suffer from editing controversies that negatively affect the page's content or stability. Once an article is granted featured article (FA) status, it is subjected to a process of continuous review to ensure the criteria continue to be met; many FAs lose their status in time. Featured articles represent the very best of Wikipedia and are thus also useful for new editors to look to as a source of ideas or benchmark for assessing their own work.

Of the 6,912,300 articles on the English Wikipedia, only 6621 hold featured article (FA) status (1 in 1,040).

Good articles are similar to featured articles and also represent some of the best work on Wikipedia. Like an A- vs. an A+ or AAA baseball vs. Major League. They are also very well written, accurate, verifiable, neutral, stable, supplemented by media, comprehensive, etc. but there is a little more leeway for the quality of writing (good, not necessarily brilliant), style (must hit all the major style guidelines, not necessarily every tiny detail), and a few other things that are explained here.

Wikipedia:Good articles - list of current good articles
Wikipedia:Good article criteria - the criteria your group project and the James B. Hunt Jr. Library articles will be evaluated according to

Nominating an Article

There are detailed instructions over at the nomination page: Wikipedia:Good article nominations.

The short version:

do not edit the nomination page in order to add your article
look at the list of topics/subtopics on the right part of the nominations page, note which is most appropriate for your article
edit your article's talk page and add the following to the top
- {{subst:GAN|subtopic=x}}, replacing x with the name of the subtopic you chose
- For example, to nominate the James B. Hunt Jr. Library, the following was added to the top of its talk page: {{subst:GAN|subtopic=Education}}
a bot will automatically add the article to the appropriate section on the nominations page
wait for someone to review it (you can watch it either on the talk page or on the nominations page)

Rhetoric

Rhetorical Analysis, part of the Wikibook on Rhetoric and Composition