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...
