Find and add a citation to an existing author page.
Many Indigenous author articles on Wikipedia get flagged for issues with citations and notability. Wikipedia strives to be an authoritative encyclopedia and has strict requirements about all information in an article needing reliable sources. They have put together a list of sources showing which ones are reliable, debated, and unreliable. They have also put together a list of external websites that should not (or only on specific circumstances) be linked to in an article. Wikipedia prefers sources which are:
- Published
- Academic/Peer Reviewed
- Secondary sources (not from Publisher or personal website, which are fine for facts/quotes, but must be used sparingly)
However, Indigenous writer representation in Wikipedia-approved reliable sources is very limited and finding those citations in Wikipedia-approved locations requires a bit of extra work to find. On Indigenous writer Wikipedia pages you will often find a citation flag:
Instructions
- Find an author whose article has citation issues on the HIW Author List.
- Read through the article to find facts or statements that need a citation.
- Do some research to find an appropriate source for that statement. In some cases, you can find suggestions for sources (either from the author themselves or from research that HIW participants have done already) in the author’s talk page or on our HIW Start Your Research page.
- Edit the page and find the end of the sentence where the citation issues applies.
- In the editing bar, click the icon for “Cite”
- Paste a link for automatic citation, or enter the citation information in manually.
- Generate the citation, then Insert.
- Publish Changes.
Complete this Activity
After you have added a citation to the author page, let us know by tweeting out the Author page and the place where the citation came from using the hashtag #HonouringIndigenousWriters.
Image Attribution: Featured photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash