User:Aaronshaw/Better Wikipedia citations

The problem

Wikipedia provides the best and most accessible single source of information on the largest number of topics in the largest number of languages. If you're anything like me, you use it all the time. If you (also like me) use Wikipedia to inform your research, teaching, or other sorts of projects that result in shared, public, or even published work, you also want to cite Wikipedia pages.

The days when teachers and professors banned students from citing Wikipedia are perhaps not entirely behind us, but let's say you're in a situation where that's not an issue. You're reading a Wikipedia page, you want to use something from it and you want to document your source responsibly. If your citation is to a piece of information that is already sourced and referenced on the Wikipedia article, you can just cut to the chase and cite that original source. But what if you want to cite the Wikpedia page itself? What can you do about the fact that any given page you cite can and probably will change?

A basic solution

A basic solution takes advantage of the fact that Wikipedia stores and makes available every previous version of every page that currently exists. In what follows below, I'll show you how you can find and cite a more durable URL (Uniform Resource Locator, or web address) that will only ever point to a specific version of a specific page. For many contexts, this is a sufficient solution, but please note that it is not comprehensive and far from "future proof" or permanent in an archival sense. Wikipedia pages can be deleted and once a page is deleted it becomes much harder to find their content again. Overcoming that requires a more advanced solution.

Anyhow, onwards with a basic, first-order fix to the immediate problem. It all starts with the little "View history" link towards the top right of every Wikipedia page...

0. Navigate to the page you want

Let's say I want to cite the article on the Seneca Falls Convention. Here's a screenshot of that article taken in February, 2020.

1. The page I want to cite in this example. Click to see a bigger version of the image and notice the "View history" link near the top right corner of the article text.

1. View history for the page you want

If you click on that screenshot or navigate to any Wikipedia page (or just look at this page—even though it's not on Wikipedia it uses the same software and a very similar interface), you'll notice a little blue link near the top-right corner of the article text that says "View history." Click on that link!

2. Select the edit you want by timestamp

2. What you see after you click "View history". Notice that the previous revisions are organized in reverse-chronological order. Also notice that each revision has a timestamp associated with it (a column near the left) and that you can click on any of the timestamps to view the revision in question.