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At Wikipedia, confused and conflicting understandings of the basic concepts of citation impedes both the practice of citation, and discussion of the practice and the attendant problems. This essay is an attempt to resolve that confusion by formulating clear, definite, consistent, and workable definitions of the basic citation concepts and the terms by which they are referred.
Some of the definitions here clash with various Help and Information pages at Wikipedia, and with certain strongly entrenched views of some editors. These definitions should not be disparaged on that basis, as the existing ambiguous concepts and misconceptions already clash, as seen in most every discussion of citation on Wikipedia involving four or more editors.[1] The definitions here have been carefully formulated to resolve these clashes (or at least to minimize them) by clarifying what these terms and concepts mean, and what they do not mean, so that these terms can have the same meaning for all of us. If these definitions are accepted it is expected that the Help and Information pages will be brought into compliance. These definitions make no change to any policy, though some interpretations of policy may need adjustment.
The need for citation arises from Wikipedia's core principle of WP:Verifiability, which, for various kinds of content, requires an ability to verify that particular content conforms to what is found in a source. This in turn requires a means of identifying sources, and of linking content to the pertinent sources. The purpose of citation is to link content to identified sources for the purpose of verification.
- ^ "Misconception" is, for some editors, just another term handy for slinging at someone else's conceptions. Its use here is predicated on a demonstration of incorrectness, or at least of contradiction.