The tag "[citation needed]" is added by Wikipedia editors to unsourced statements in articles requesting citations to be added. [1] The phrase is reflective of the policies of verifiability and original research on Wikipedia and has become a general Internet meme. [2]
The tag was first used on Wikipedia in 2006, [2] and its template created by user Ta bu shi da yu. By Wikipedia policy, editors should add citations for content, to ensure accuracy and neutrality, and to avoid original research. [3] The citation needed tag is used to mark statements that lack such citations. [1] As of June 2023 [update] , there were more than 539,000 pages on Wikipedia (or roughly 1% of all pages) containing at least one instance of the tag. [1] Users who click the tag will be directed to pages about Wikipedia's verifiability policy and its application using the tag. [4]
![A 2007 xkcd comic by Randall Munroe featuring a protester with a "[citation needed]" placard Webcomic xkcd - Wikipedian protester.png](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/Webcomic_xkcd_-_Wikipedian_protester.png/220px-Webcomic_xkcd_-_Wikipedian_protester.png)
In 2008, Matt Mechtley created stickers with "[citation needed]", encouraging people to stick them on advertisements. [5]
In 2010, American television hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert led the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where some participants held placards with "[citation needed]". [6]
Randall Munroe has frequently used "[citation needed]" tags for humorous commentary in his writings, including in his 2014 book What If? . [7] [8] [9]
The podcast "Citations Needed" is a Webby nominated [10] media criticism podcast, hosted by journalists Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson to explore the intersection of media, PR, and power. [11]
Youtuber Tom Scott and The Technical Difficulties used "[citation needed]" as the title for a Wikipedia-based gameshow that ran from 2014 to 2018. [12]
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is an independent agency of the United States government within the executive branch, charged with the preservation and documentation of government and historical records. It is also tasked with increasing public access to those documents that make up the National Archives. NARA is officially responsible for maintaining and publishing the legally authentic and authoritative copies of acts of Congress, presidential directives, and federal regulations. NARA also transmits votes of the Electoral College to Congress. It also examines Electoral College and constitutional amendment ratification documents for prima facie legal sufficiency and an authenticating signature.
A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of acknowledging the relevance of the works of others to the topic of discussion at the spot where the citation appears.
Wiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms in all natural languages and in a number of artificial languages. These entries may contain definitions, images for illustration, pronunciations, etymologies, inflections, usage examples, quotations, related terms, and translations of terms into other languages, among other features. It is collaboratively edited via a wiki. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and dictionary. It is available in 195 languages and in Simple English. Like its sister project Wikipedia, Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, and is written collaboratively by volunteers, dubbed "Wiktionarians". Its wiki software, MediaWiki, allows almost anyone with access to the website to create and edit entries.
Scientific citation is providing detailed reference in a scientific publication, typically a paper or book, to previous published communications which have a bearing on the subject of the new publication. The purpose of citations in original work is to allow readers of the paper to refer to cited work to assist them in judging the new work, source background information vital for future development, and acknowledge the contributions of earlier workers. Citations in, say, a review paper bring together many sources, often recent, in one place.
Keio University, abbreviated as Keio (慶應) or Keidai (慶大), is a private research university located in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It was originally established as a school for Western studies in 1858 in Edo. It was granted university status in 1920, becoming one of the first private universities in the country.
Wikisource is an online wiki-based digital library of free-content textual sources operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole; it is also the name for each instance of that project, one for each language. The project's aim is to host all forms of free text, in many languages, and translations. Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, it has expanded to become a general-content library. The project officially began on November 24, 2003, under the name Project Sourceberg, a play on Project Gutenberg. The name Wikisource was adopted later that year and it received its own domain name.
The Democratic Socialist Party was a political party in Japan from 1960 to 1994.
References to Wikipedia in popular culture have been widespread. Many parody Wikipedia's openness, with individuals vandalizing or modifying articles in nonconstructive ways. Others feature individuals using Wikipedia as a reference work, or positively comparing their intelligence to Wikipedia. In some cases, Wikipedia is not used as an encyclopedia at all, but instead serves more as a character trait or even as a game, such as Wikiracing. Wikipedia has also become culturally significant with many individuals seeing the presence of their own Wikipedia entry as a status symbol.
Randall Patrick Munroe is an American cartoonist, author, and engineer best known as the creator of the webcomic xkcd. Munroe has worked full-time on the comic since late 2006. In addition to publishing a book of the webcomic's strips, titled xkcd: Volume 0, he has written four books: What If?, Thing Explainer, How To, and What If? 2.
xkcd, sometimes styled XKCD, is a serial webcomic created in 2005 by American author Randall Munroe. The comic's tagline describes it as "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language". Munroe states on the comic's website that the name of the comic is not an initialism but "just a word with no phonetic pronunciation".
Michael Wayne Godwin is an American attorney and author. He was the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and he created the Internet adage Godwin's law and the notion of an Internet meme. From July 2007 to October 2010, he was general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. In March 2011, he was elected to the Open Source Initiative board. Godwin has served as a contributing editor of Reason magazine since 1994. In April 2019, he was elected to the Internet Society board. From 2015 to 2020, he was general counsel and director of innovation policy at the R Street Institute. In August 2020, he and the Blackstone Law Group filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on behalf of the employees of TikTok, and worked there between June 2021 and June 2022. Since October 2022, he has worked as the policy and privacy lead at Anonym, a "privacy-safe advertising" startup.
The General Directorate for Internal Security is a French security agency. It is charged with counter-espionage, counter-terrorism, countering cybercrime and surveillance of potentially threatening groups, organisations and social phenomena.
Owen Smith, known professionally as Owen Benjamin, is an American conspiracy theorist and internet personality known for promoting white supremacy, antisemitism, homophobia, and neo-Nazism. He was a stand-up comedian and actor who had roles in mainstream film and television between 2008 and 2015.
Circular reporting, or false confirmation, is a situation in source criticism where a piece of information appears to come from multiple independent sources, but in reality comes from only one source. In many cases, the problem happens mistakenly through sloppy reporting or intelligence-gathering. However, the situation can also be intentionally contrived by the source or reporter as a way of reinforcing the widespread belief in its information.
Lawrence Mark Sanger is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined Wikipedia's name, and provided initial drafts for many of its early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies. Prior to Wikipedia, he was the editor-in-chief of Nupedia, another online encyclopedia. He later worked on other encyclopedic projects, including Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, and Everipedia, and advised the nonprofit American political encyclopedia Ballotpedia.
Thomas Scott is an English YouTuber and web developer. On his self-titled YouTube channel, Scott creates educational videos across a range of topics including history, geography, linguistics, science, and technology. As of August 2024, his five YouTube channels have collectively gained over 7.8 million subscribers and 1.87 billion views.
Wikipedia's volunteer editor community has the responsibility of fact-checking Wikipedia's content. Their aim is to curb the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation by the website.
Volunteer editors of Wikipedia delete articles from the online encyclopedia regularly, following processes that have been formulated by the site's community over time. The most common route is the outright deletion of articles that clearly violate the rules of the website. Other mechanisms include an intermediate collaborative process that bypasses a complete discussion, and a whole debate at the dedicated forum called Articles for deletion (AfD). As a technical action, deletion can only be done by a subset of editors assigned particular specialized privileges by the community, called administrators. An omission that has been carried out can be contested by appeal to the deleting administrator or on another discussion board called Deletion review (DRV).
Secular Shrine Theory or Jinja hishūkyōron (神社非宗教論) was a religious policy and political theory that arose in Japan during the 19th and early 20th centuries due to the separation of church and state of the Meiji Government. It was the idea that Shinto Shrines were secular in their nature rather than religious, and that Shinto was not a religion, but rather a secular set of Japanese national traditions. This was linked to State Shinto and the idea that the state controlling and enforcing Shinto was not a violation of freedom of religion. It was subject to immense debate over this time and ultimately declined and disappeared during the Shōwa era.
Lim Hooi Seong was a Chinese anthropologist and archaeologist who contributed significantly to the development of the studies of anthropology and ethnology in China. An expert in ethnic research, he was involved in the Academia Sinica during its founding and conducted studies on Taiwanese indigenous peoples and Malays throughout the 1930s. He was also an early alumnus of Xiamen University, being one of its earliest academicians, and founded the Museum of Anthropology of Xiamen University, the first anthropological museum in China.
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The dictionary definition of citation needed at Wiktionary
