Citation needed

"[Citation needed]" is a tag added by Wikipedia editors to unsourced statements in articles requesting citations to be added.[1] The phrase is reflective of the policies of verifiability and no original research on Wikipedia and has become a general Internet meme.[2]

An example of the citation needed template as seen in an article on the English Wikipedia

Usage on Wikipedia

The tag was first used on Wikipedia in 2006,[2] and its template created by user Ta bu shi da yu. By Wikipedia policy, editors should add citations for content, to ensure accuracy and neutrality, and to avoid original research.[3] The citation needed tag is used to mark statements that lack such citations.[1] As of June 2023, there were more than 539,000 pages on Wikipedia (or roughly 1% of all pages) containing at least one instance of the tag.[1] Users who click the tag will be directed to pages about Wikipedia's verifiability policy and its application using the tag.[4]

Usage outside Wikipedia
A 2007 xkcd comic by Randall Munroe featuring a protester with a "[citation needed]" placard

In 2008, Matt Mechtley created stickers with "[citation needed]", encouraging people to stick them on advertisements.[5]

Protesters at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, 2010

In 2010, American television hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert led the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where some participants held placards with "[citation needed]".[6]

Randall Munroe has frequently used "[citation needed]" tags for humorous commentary in his writings, including in his 2014 book What If?[7][8][9]

From 2014 to 2018, Tom Scott, Chris Joel, Gary Brannan and Matt Gray a.k.a. 'The Technical Difficulties' had a YouTube panel show titled "Citation Needed". Will Seaward and Matt Parker also featured as guest panelists in episodes 6x03, 6x04, 7x03 and 7x04 standing in for Gray.[10]

In May 2017 the podcast Citation Needed started issuing weekly episodes about any "subject, read a single Wikipedia article about it, and pretend we’re experts. Because this is the internet, and that’s how it works now".[11]

    References
    1. Redi, Miriam; Fetahu, Besnik; Morgan, Jonathan; Taraborelli, Dario (13 May 2019). "Citation Needed: A Taxonomy and Algorithmic Assessment of Wikipedia's Verifiability". The World Wide Web Conference. WWW '19. San Francisco, CA, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 1567–1578. doi:10.1145/3308558.3313618. ISBN 978-1-4503-6674-8. S2CID 67856117.
    2. McDowell, Zachary J.; Vetter, Matthew A. (2022). "What Counts as Information: The Construction of Reliability and Verifability". Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality. Routledge, Taylor & Francis. p. 34. doi:10.4324/9781003094081. ISBN 978-1-000-47427-5.
    3. 栗岡 幹英 [Masahide Kurioka] (2010-03-01). "インターネットは言論の公共圏たりうるか：ブログとウィキペディアの内容分析" [Can the Internet be the Public Sphere of Discourse? : Contents Analysis of Blog and Wikipedia]. 奈良女子大学社会学論集 [Nara Women's University Sociological Studies] (in Japanese). 奈良女子大学社会学研究会 [Nara Women's University Sociological Study Group] (17): 133–151. ISSN 1340-4032.
    4. McDowell, Zachary J.; Vetter, Matthew A. (July 2020). "It Takes a Village to Combat a Fake News Army: Wikipedia's Community and Policies for Information Literacy". Social Media + Society. 6 (3). doi:10.1177/2056305120937309. ISSN 2056-3051. S2CID 222110748.
    5. Glenn, Joshua (2008-01-02). "[citation needed]". The Boston Globe. Archived from the original on 2018-07-27. Retrieved 2018-07-27.
    6. Johnson, Ted (2010-11-01). "Satirical rally calls for sanity and/or fear". Variety. Archived from the original on 2010-11-16. Retrieved 2018-07-27.
    7. Munroe, Randall (2014). What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. Hachette UK. ISBN 9780544272644. Retrieved 2021-06-15.
    8. Hill, Kyle (2014-09-02). "Review: XKCD's What If?". Nerdist. Retrieved 2021-07-12.
    9. Poole, Steven (2019-09-19). "Book Review: 'What If' by Randall Munroe". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2021-07-12.
    10. Scott, Tom (October 3, 2019). "Citation Needed, from the Technical Difficulties". Archived from the original on May 6, 2022. Retrieved 2022-05-11 – via YouTube.
    11. "Citation Needed Podcast - About". Citation Needed. Retrieved 2023-08-23.
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