User:Karunamon/Essays/Citations

As someone who made some downright cringe worthy edits back in 2006, I wanted to share something I learned about how citations work on Wikipedia. Something that I've seen trip up a lot of newbies, since it's not immediately obvious even after reading through the policies.

A scenario
Let's say you're writing an article about internet memes. Let's say this meme is called "Fast loris".

Your favorite website, √16chan, finds itself enamored with this meme to the point where it's on every single page. You can't use the site for more than 5 seconds without running into fast lorises everywhere.

You figure this happening is notable enough to warrant a blurb on √16chan's Wikipedia page.

You add something to the article along the lines of

"As of July 2024, the fast loris meme is on every board on the site."

- You

So far, so good.

Reverted!?
About half an hour later, you come back, and your change is reverted. The edit summary for the revert says something along the lines of how your citation doesn't prove that the fast loris is everywhere on √16chan. But.. that doesn't make any damn sense. Anyone can click through and see the lorises (lorisii?) everywhere. In fact, they are, literally everywhere now. The site now has pictures of fast lorises included into every single page via CSS tricks.

Okay, so you think that maybe the edit got reverted because they'll remove the speedy little buggers in the future. That's fair. So you grab a snapshot from the Internet Archive, and make your edit look like this:

"In July 2024, the fast loris meme was visible everywhere on the site."

Reverted again
Aaaand it happened again. Even better, you got a warning on your userpage from some elitist old timer along the lines of:

Okay, this is infuriating. What is this guy's deal? Why is he being such a WP:DICK? My citation is direct proof of what I put in the article. This would be good enough for any academic paper for crying out loud!

And that's the problem
What you just did is original research. You verified a fact, and then wrote about it in Wikipedia. In an academic paper, this would be acceptable. It is not acceptable on Wikipedia.

If you wanted your blurb on cute, fuzzy, speedy little loriseses to stay, you'd have to find another reliable source that wrote about it, and then cite that instead.

Put another way, Wikipedia is not allowed to be a witness to history - it only aggregates and summarizes other, more reliable witnesses.

What this means for you
If you see something interesting happen, and you want it here, your first thought should be "Okay, who do I know that's reliable that's written about this?".

Karunamon  Talk  04:46, 28 December 2016 (UTC)