Wikipedia:Citation overkill

This is probably too many sources to cite for a single point.

Wikipedia requires material to be verifiable. This means adding some form of inline citations for anything challenged or likely to be challenged, and for all direct quotations.

While adding footnotes is helpful, adding too many can cause citation clutter, which can make articles look untidy in read mode, and unreadable in edit mode. If there are a few citations that are either mirror pages or just parrot the other sources, having them could be a detriment to the readability of the page.

One cause of "citation overkill" is edit warring, which can lead to examples such as "Garphism is the study of ...". Extreme cases have seen fifteen or more footnotes after a single word, as an editor desperately shores up his point and/or overall notability of the subject with extra citations, in the hope that his opponents will accept there are reliable sources for his edit.

Citation overkill clutters pages, making them unreadable. 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, how do we know that the material isn't just made up? A good rule of thumb is that one footnote after a sentence is almost always sufficient, two or three may be a good way of preventing linkrot for online sources or providing a range of sources that support the fact, and more than three should be avoided as clutter.

Not only does citation overkill impact the readability of article, it can call the notability of the subject into question by some editors. A well meaning editor may attempt to make a subject which does not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines through quantity of sources. This serves as a red flag to experienced editors that the article needs scrutiny and each citation needs to be verified carefully to ensure that it was really used to contribute to the article.

Use of citations to prove an obvious point

It is also possible that an editor who is trying to promote an article to GA-class or something might add citations to basic facts such as, "...the sky is blue..." While this might be a good thing in their eyes, Wikipedia:Common sense applies—you don't need to cite that the sky is blue.

How to trim excessive citations

If there are six citations on a point of information, and the first three are highly reputable sources (e.g., books published by university presses) and the last three citations are a bit dodgy on the reputability point of view (e.g., local newsletters), then trim out the less-reputable sources.

If all of the citations are "A 1"-level as far as reputability, another way to trim the number of citations is to make sure that there is a good mix of types of sources. For example, if the six citations include two books, two journal articles, and two encyclopedia articles, the citations could be trimmed down to one citation from each type of source. Comprehensive works on a topic often include many of the same points. Not all such works on a topic need be cited; choose the one or ones that seem to be the best combination of eminent, balanced and current.

In some cases, such as articles related to technology or computing or other fields that are changing very rapidly, it may be desirable to have the sources be as up-to-date as possible. So a few of the older citations could be removed.

For many subjects, some sources are official or otherwise authoritative, while others are only interpretational, summarizing or opinional. If the authoritative sources are not controversial, they should generally be preferred. For example, a company's own website is probably authoritative for a noncontroversial fact like where its headquarters is located, so newspaper articles need not be cited on that point; and the World Wide Web Consortium's specifications themselves are more authoritative, by definition, about what those HTML and CSS specs require, than third-party Web development tutorials.

Try to construct passages so that an entire sentence or more can be cited to a particular source, instead of having sentences that each require multiple sources.

Examples

(This is not meant to drum up support for this essay, only to illustrate some examples of multiple citations for a statement. Most of these have since been cleaned up.)

• Sara Watson overkill (No longer contains this issue)
• Stewie Griffin overkill (No longer contains this issue)
• Juice Plus overkill
• Super citation overkill on Generation Y
• 17 citations for one sentence on 2004 Madrid train bombings
• William Evans (Medal of Honor recipient) - Sixteen citations
• Educology 172 citations for one sentence (article was not in the mainspace at the time, no longer contains this issue)
• Palestinian Christians 65 citations in opening paragraph (the article no longer contains this issue)
• White power skinhead, 15 citations for one statement.

See also

• Wikipedia:Bombardment
• Wikipedia:You don't need to cite that the sky is blue
• Wikipedia:Masking the lack of notability
• Wikipedia:Overlink crisis
• mw:Extension:HarvardReferences - extension to improve references into Harvard style.