Wikipedia:Citation overkill

This is an essay on the Verifiability policy and the Citing Sources guideline. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

Shortcuts WP:CITEKILL WP:OVERKILL WP:OVERCITE WP:TOOMANYREFS WP:REFCLUTTER

This page in a nutshell: When citing material in an article, it is better to cite a couple of great sources than a stack of decent or sub-par ones.

Wikipedia policy requires all content within articles to be verifiable. While adding inline citations is helpful, adding too many can cause citation clutter, making articles look untidy in read mode and difficult to navigate in markup edit mode. If a page features citations that are mirror pages of others, or which simply parrot the other sources, they contribute nothing to the article's reliability and are detrimental to its readability.

One cause of "citation overkill" is edit warring, which can lead to examples like "Graphism is the study^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]} of ...". Extreme cases have seen fifteen or more footnotes after a single word, as an editor tries to strengthen their point or the overall notability of the subject with extra citations, in the hope that others will accept that reliable sources support it. Similar circumstances can also lead to overkill with legitimate sources, when existing sources have been repeatedly removed or disputed on spurious grounds or against consensus.

Another common cause of citation overkill is simply that people want the source they've seen to be included in the article too, so they just tack it onto the end of existing content without making an effort to actually add any new content.

The purpose of any article is first and foremost to be read – unreadable articles do not give our readers any material worth verifying. It is also important for an article to be verifiable. Without citations, we cannot know that the material isn't just made up, unless it is a case of common sense (see WP:BLUE). A good rule of thumb is to cite at least one inline citation for each section of text that may be challenged or is likely to be challenged, or for direct quotations. Two or three may be preferred for more controversial material or as a way of preventing linkrot for online sources, but more than three should generally be avoided; if four or more are needed, consider bundling (merging) the citations.

Not only does citation overkill impact the readability of an article, it can call the notability of the subject into question by editors. A well-meaning editor may attempt to make a subject which does not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines appear to be notable through sheer quantity of sources, without actually paying any attention to the quality of the sources. Ironically, this serves as a red flag to experienced editors that the article needs scrutiny and that each citation needs to be verified carefully to ensure that it was really used to contribute to the article.