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YOU MIGHT BE ON THE WRONG PAGE.This page is not meant for general questions, nor discussions about specific articles. This page is only for discussions about the Misplaced Pages page Misplaced Pages:Citation needed. To discuss an article, please use that article's talk page. To ask for help with using and editing Misplaced Pages, use our Teahouse. Alternatively, see our FAQ.

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This page has been mentioned by a media organization: Kerry Howley (March 2008). "Artifact: The World Needs Citations". Reason Magazine.

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Request for opinions - is 'citation needed' overused

I wonder if anyone else feels that there are too many requests for citations needed that disturb reading flow and are often requesting citations for things that, in all honesty really don't need a citation. I have just come from yet another page (Mig 31 I didn't write it, I have never edited it before) where just about every para ends in 'citation needed', despite the fact there are many many inline citations hardly any of which are for contentious facts, and virtually all the requested information could be found in the references. One was actually asking for a citation to justify the description that was not only obviously true to anyone with basic knowledge in the area but was also illustrated with pictures in links already in the sentence.

I feel "Citation needed" has is often transitioning from a noble idea to ensure good referencing practise into a form of cut and paste vandalism. There is no perfect solution, however one I suggest;

A note to users suggesting;

- Everyone can be a writer as well as an editor. Before requesting a citation, make a reasonable effort to find one yourself. At least scroll through any references provided and try Google.

- If you are not familiar with the topic, and the statement does not seem contentious, think carefully before requesting a citation.

And however politically impossible it will be in an editor dominated political culture, I would love a bot to remove requests for citation are automatically removed after 6 months unless the person who has asked for a citation provides an explanation of their attempt to locate a citation themselves.Winstonwolfe (talk) 07:14, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Winstonwolfe, "citation needed" is definitely overused. And I hate it when an editor overtags with it instead of simply placing Template:Unreferenced or Template:Refimprove at the top of the article, or in a section that is specifically unsourced or needs more sources. Flyer22 (talk) 07:28, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

As for trying to find a source yourself before tagging something as needing a citation, that is what the WP:Burden and WP:Preserve policies state. Flyer22 (talk) 07:30, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Sometimes the requests border on the absurd. Last night I edited the page on Goerke's Corners, Wisconsin adding a pop culture reference (It's mentioned several times in a 1949 movie.) and including a link to the movie's page here in Misplaced Pages, which includes more information on the reference than I used. Within less than four hours, somebody, probably a bot, added a request for citation. I'd think that having a link to the other page in my addition would have been sufficient. JDZeff (talk) 22:46, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

It's not sufficient as Misplaced Pages is forever changing. That is, the citation(s) on the other page could change or be deleted. You should copy it/them over to the new page. Each Misplaced Pages article need it's own citations - that is, it needs to stand alone. — Lentower (talk) 04:22, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

{{Citation needed}} is not seriously overused, except when {{Unreferenced}} or {{Unreferenced section}} can be used.

Though I prefer {{Citation needed-span}} as it shows exactly what text needs to be verified by citation. — Lentower (talk) 04:22, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Is there a point where we can say that "citation needed" has become vandalism? It appears (yes, I am using weasel words; I cannot prove these assumptions) that it happens when an editor feels slighted in NPOV battles. Instead of retiring gracefully, they seem to spam articles with CITE tags at the end of virtually every sentence. Far from improving our encyclopedia, it makes articles nearly unreadable. I am primarily a consumer now, editing mainly for grammar and links (my highly-active editing days are past), but I find excessive CITE tags incredibly disruptive. If we decide that CITE is fine as it is, could we consider changing the very long tag with something smaller, along the lines of or even with a tooltip of "Citation needed. Please help improve this article by adding reliable sources"? User:Kevin.159.53 posting as IP 159.53.78.143 (talk) 15:59, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

I think there is a limit to assuming good faith on this one, and we have long crossed it. "Citation needed" is and always was about vandalism by NPOV battle losers and deletionists. It certainly doesn't make Misplaced Pages any better for the reader; it does the opposite. 97.104.85.21 (talk) 17:30, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

Yes, "citation needed" has in fact become a running joke on explain xkcd and xkcd what if for that very reason.

there hasn't been a discussion here on what to do when one finds a page that has been overtagged. i stumbled across a page, during a meandering stroll down a wiki-hole, and it was almost unreadable. i actually know very little (okay, nothing) about the subject, so can't try to add a few sources. i checked the history, and they were all added, 3 weeks ago, by one user. i looked at that user's page, and he/she seems to be a very active editor out here. so much so, that i would certainly think he/she would know better than to do this. i checked the 3 sources already on the page (1 dead, 1 marked as dead but not, 1 fine)--the dead one and the one marked as dead but available had both been checked 3 weeks ago by the same editor that inserted all the tags. i added a section on the Talk page, calling out the overuse of the tags. (no attempt had been made on the Talk page to discuss the article's verifiability by the overtagging editor.)

so...what is one supposed to do? here's the page. laugh as you must: https://en.wikipedia.org/Sex_swing Colbey84 (talk) 14:47, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

Apologies, but object strongly, to content in article here based on decades of experience

… both as an academic faculty member in the sciences, and as a longstanding editor at WP. Here are the specific objections.

1. Essentially, from a probabilistic perspective, it is never the case (probability approaching zero) that the citation-at-end-of-paragraph-covers-whole-paragraph generalization is true here. This sentence/guideline should be deleted, or edited to read that "Paragraphs with single citations at end of paragraph should periodically have the single citation checked—i.e., after intervening edits—for its continuing coverage of the entire paragraph's material; when the material is confirmed, the reference should explicitly state the coverage (e.g., 'The full content of this sentence is taken from {{cite journal… '), addition of which should be traceable through the Edit summary. Until such checking is done, a single paragraph-ending citation should bear an inline {{verification needed}} tag." If one needs a professional justification for this comment, see any set of scientific reviews, e.g., off top of head, here, and tabulate the number of paragraphs appearing that have but a single citation. In technical, fact-filled writing, that number is near to zero.
2. The same is essentially true of the attachment of a single citation to a complex or long sentence that is technical, or otherwise fact-filled. Again, consult any small set of scientific reviews for justification, or even just the one linked above. In such, you will see that sentences routinely have two or more citations, often appearing at the breakpoints between phrases in their construction (or attached to individual elements connected by conjunctions). Again, the verbiage of this "Citation needed" article should reflect reality—that it is, probabilistically (in this editor's experience), more likely at WP that an editor has added a disparate phrase, post hoc, unsourced, than they returned to the original source, and found further information to add from that source, such that a new edit is also covered by the old citation. In this sense, an editor should be directed in this article, with something like, "Any newly appearing material should be considered suspect, as unsourced, until it is verified as having been sourced from the originally appearing citation, and until such time the original single source can be checked, an inline {{verification needed}} tag should be placed."
3. From the perspective of one that has professional publication experience and (therein) experience generating team-produced documents of high quality, as well as longstanding WP editorial experience and professional consulting experience regarding scientific R&D operations, the prohibition, stated here in this article, of having both section {{refimprove}} and inline {{citation needed}} tags is likewise poorly considered and so seriously flawed, especially in combination with the foregoing assumptions made regarding paragraph-single-citation situations. Operationally, and for simplicity, consider a section with a tag of {{refimprove}} for one paragraph that contains abundant technical or historical content, sentence after sentence, but no citations, and no inline {{citation needed}} tags. Consider the following: An editor comes upon the tag and completely unsourced paragraph, attempts to help and finds a source for one sentence (and for sake of argument, while it could be any sentence of the paragraph, let's make it), the last sentence of the paragraph. The editor adds that citation. Per the stated assumptions, even if the editor placing the one source (and knowing its limited coverage to the single sentence) leaves the section tag in place, the next editor to come along, based on the presumptions of this article, would see fit to remove the section tag, even though only a small percentage of the issue (one unsourced sentence of several) had been addressed.

It is for the reason of clarity of the status of individual elements in a shared document, created by a team, that full, explicit information, line by line is preferred over more global (section by section) tags. Anyone who has produced a shared regulatory document knows that "More sources are needed in this section." is not so helpful of a sidebar Comment; much preferred, instead, is "The first half of Sentence 4 still needs a source." Global section or chapter Comments, in shared document generation, are simply flags to call wide attention of other editors to big remaining problems (the same role section and article tags are intended to play here); it is the inline tag that is the workhorse, and makes clear where work is actually, specifically needed. In short, the inline vs. other tags serve different purposes, and to deny their joint appearance in problematic sections is simply misguided, operationally.

The bottom line from my reading of this article on this tag: It is hopefully optimistic, and as a result hopelessly disconnected from the realities of shared document production, and of the way in which work is done at Misplaced Pages. If people take this article seriously, it goes a long way to explaining the rampant unchallenged plagiarism and other WP:VERIFY violations that are easily and repeatedly found throughout this encyclopedia, which claims its reliably to be just that—the extent to which it is actually traceable to sources that can be verified.

There is only a single reason I can see, for not allowing thorough tagging of sentences, paragraphs, and sections that are problematic vis-a-vis sourcing, and it is one I find wholly unjustifiable from a scholarly perspective (see Ch. Lipson's "Doing Honest Work…")—that we care more for the cosmetic aspects, the appearance of our articles, than for truly moving articles toward quality (and informing readers, honestly, about their status, meanwhile).

I would encourage a strong edit of this guiding article, to move it in the direction of reflecting, and so dealing with, Misplaced Pages reality, and encouraging honest and continuing assessment of the status of texts and sources at Misplaced Pages. Cheers. Le Prof 50.179.252.14 (talk) 02:31, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

See the mild edit I did of this date. Cheers. Le Prof Leprof 7272 (talk) 03:33, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

And I disagree with you making these substantial changes without discussion. A number of editors, including me, disagree with the way you add "citation needed" tags. That was most recently clear in this discussion. You overtag, and commonly add "citation needed" tags where they are not needed. So you should not be changing this page to comply with your tagging style. And if you insist on reverting, I will insist on starting a RfC on the matter and bringing in as many editors to this discussion as possible. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 21:02, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

For now, I alerted this and this page to this discussion. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 23:22, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

I can certainly appreciate the Prof's logic.

I also have a huge problem with the passage that was reverted to: "If you feel an article, or a section within an article, needs more than one or two tags then ALWAYS add a {{Unreferenced}}, {{Refimprove}}, or {{Unreferenced section}} tag to the article or section concerned instead of an ugly battery of individual tags..", and it's not just the weird double periods at the end of the one sentence paragraph.

It's difficult to find any article within the English Misplaced Pages where it's not technically feasible to stick an eye-wateringly obtrusive {{Refimprove}} template right at the top. Many pages I visit to copyedit have had one there for years with no help offered as to what particular word or phrase is especially problematic and no clue given on the article's discussion page as to when I can remove the template since the test to be passed before removal is essentially Sisyphusian.

I also agree with Flyer22 that, because of the repercussions and wide-ranging nature of the changes, the reverted edit should be treated as the Bold part of BRD and look forward to being educated by the ensuing discussion... BushelCandle (talk) 08:37, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

The basic difficulty of the "cn tag lover's" argument is that a cn tag is in itself NEVER an "improvement" to any article. The theory is that it will quickly attract a responsible editor who will check the statement concerned for verifiability, and either add a good, reliable citation, delete the statement as doubtful and unverifiable, or, perhaps best of all - add a new statement - cited this time, that better accords with the sources. As we all know - this kind of improvement practically never happens as the result of a cn tag - the typical example will stay (for weeks, months, or even years) until someone deletes it as stale and unnecessary - all too often without either changing of deleting the statement in question, or for that matter adding a good citation.

These tags would not be necessary at all if:

• Editors worked directly from sources more than they do (while avoiding direct plagiarism of course, and citing everything that needs to be cited). Plead guilty to this one myself occasionally. It would be futile to deny that many wiki articles need constructive, well cited improvements.
• The editors who love to tag everything in sight bore the guidelines here more in mind - which essentially boil down to this - if the statement you are about to tag is THAT doubtful you would more than likely be much better off simply deleting it altogether. If you suspect it is probably true, but feel that nonetheless that it really needs to be cited, then finding a citation yourself is MUCH more constructive than tagging it. I might add that IF (and, alas, it is a big big IF!) the tag is justified, then the tagger is likely him/herself to be the very person to have a good idea where to start looking for the right citation!
• A sentence, and a paragraph, and even a section, very often (although of course not always) essentially represents a single thought, that can be referenced by a single citation. WHERE this is obviously the case it is NEVER good policy to add several cn tags in the middle of the sentence (paragraph, section). Alas it often happens, which is why the sections objected to are there.
• A really genuinely "BAD" article or section needs an overall tag - it is futile, generally speaking, to attempt to tag every doubtful point. Even here - better really to remark (on the talk page please) that the article or section in question is bad, and rewrite it yourself - making sure to add your citations as you go - or at least before you put your work in the "public" article area. --Soundofmusicals (talk) 12:24, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Agreed, although, given this discussion, I think you should have discussed this addition before adding it. I agree with the "If you feel an article, or a section within an article, needs more than one or two tags, then at least consider adding a {{Unreferenced}}, {{Refimprove}}, or {{Unreferenced section}} tag to the article or section concerned instead of an ugly battery of individual tags." sentence because excessive tagging often makes things worse and it has not shown to help any more than a single tag. And in both cases, the tags can be there for years. Rather than always focusing on the WP:Burden policy, editors need to start taking the WP:Preserve policy in mind; it states, in part, "Fix problems if you can, flag or remove them if you can't. Preserve appropriate content. As long as any facts or ideas would belong in an encyclopedia, they should be retained in Misplaced Pages. Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia." Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 03:16, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Two changes

Hi all, made a couple changes to the page:

• First, with these edits, I invited viewers of the page to help with the backlog. This includes using an external tool that is very useful at making the 300, 000 article backlog more manageable.
• Second, with this edit, I made the section about using the template less bullying and incrimination for adding the template: editors frequently add cns to articles which they don't have the interest, time or skills to research properly. We don't want the help page to be accusatory and create guilt for people who are doing positive contributions elsewhere on the site.

Let me know if there are any questions, Sadads (talk) 13:10, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Really excellent changes - now a much more useful little guide. I cut one sentence however, that seemed out of place - raising a question that would only apply to editors between two sentences referring to issues applicable to the (much larger) body of users who are NOT editors - and presumably have no idea what the citation needed tag is about. --Soundofmusicals (talk) 04:20, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

More recent changes

I added a policy shortcut template link to WP:CITENEED. It has since been changed to an information page template by Moxy, though he/she originally had it as a supplement template. Either change is obviously better, but I'm curious if the "policy" has enough consensus to be considered an actual guideline, as it currently states it "...describes a communal consensus...". It's certainly a de facto consensus, but I'm assuming there's a more formal process to be considered "communal consensus"?    DKqwerty    04:41, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Okay, so I just looked at Moxy's user page, and clearly he/she would know far more about this than I. (As an aside, I'm sometimes surprised by the occasional lack of formality on Misplaced Pages, especially when other times I make what I assume is a simple change and then my head's taken off for it.) At any rate, is there a formal process here?    DKqwerty    04:48, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

WP:Essay explains alot. This has never been a policy/guideline page. I made the edit after I saw your above addition to WP:FAILEDVERIFICATION with an edit-sum stating policy link.....edit was fine...but this pages status within the community was not. This page is simply a "layman's version" of the templates documentation both are a type of essay WP:Local consensus. As for what essay banner to use...thought this was best from those at Misplaced Pages:Template messages/Wikipedia namespace. As for promotion to a guideline...with a bit of work it could pass the WP:PROPOSAL process.--Moxy (talk) 05:30, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

• Misplaced Pages pages referenced by the press
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