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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)[reply]

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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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 Wikipedia, 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)[reply]
It's not sufficient as Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia article need it's own citations - that is, it needs to stand alone. — Lentower (talk) 04:22, 2 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
{{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)[reply]
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 [citation needed] tag with something smaller, along the lines of [ref?] 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)[reply]
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 Wikipedia any better for the reader; it does the opposite. 97.104.85.21 (talk) 17:30, 17 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, "citation needed" has in fact become a running joke on explain xkcd and xkcd what if for that very reason. [citation needed]


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/wiki/Sex_swing Colbey84 (talk) 14:47, 18 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 2 December 2015

Carl Denaro was 20-years old and Rosemary Keenan was 21-years old at the time of their shooting incident. 108.21.205.201 (talk) 22:41, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 31 December 2015

delete "Downes became Commodore of the Mediterranean Squadron, and from 1828 to 1829 he commanded the Java in the Mediterranean.[citation needed]" add "Downes was Commanding Officer of the ship-of-the-line USS Delaware in 1828 to 1829 when it was the flagship of Commodore Crane of the Mediterranean Squadron" citation "Delaware put to sea 10 February 1828 under the command of Captain J. Downs to become the flagship of Commodore W. M. Crane in the Mediterranean." From Delaware III (Ship of the Line) Naval History and Heritage Command online Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships at http://history.navy.mil

108.16.191.130 (talk) 20:01, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Not done: as you are in the wrong place, this talk page is solely for discussing improvements to the page Wikipedia:Citation needed.
Please make your request at the talk page for the relevant article. - Arjayay (talk) 14:34, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 6 January 2016

I want to change it so that The spark of rebellion counts as two episode instead of a movie. The official blu-ray and DVD as well as netflix says it's two episodes, so that is the only truth. I also want to change so that the shorts isn't in the series category, because they aren't a part of the series, they were small prequel shorts to create hype around the show. So i'd put them into their own category. Some people might try to tell that spark of rebellion doesn't count as two episodes, but the blu-ray, dvd and netflix (i'm pretty sure it's only on netflix in scandinavia) is proof.

83.93.114.80 (talk) 19:04, 6 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Not done: this is the talk page for discussing improvements to the page Wikipedia:Citation needed. Please make your request at the talk page for the article concerned. Mz7 (talk) 20:04, 6 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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 he 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 Wikipedia. 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, Wikipedia reality, and encouraging honest and continuing assessment of the status of texts and sources at Wikipedia. Cheers. Le Prof 50.179.252.14 (talk) 02:31, 29 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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