Wikipedia talk:Citation overkill

Changing kill reference

In the big scheme of things this is very low priority, but I was updating the Nice shooting article and realized after the fact that using citekill was potentially insensitive and inappropriate. What do you think about getting rid of citekill and citeoverkill as references and just using overcite and the less violent variations? I know it will be a hard thing to unlearn for some people, but in the long run perhaps it will be more sensitive. As far as I can tell all that has to happen is the two variations have to be removed from this article. Thoughts? Timtempleton (talk), 02:44, 22 July 2016‎ (UTC)

I'd support this. Use of both 'kill' and 'bomb' is needlessly militaristic and confrontational. PaulT2022 (talk) 00:01, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Overquote in citations

Is there any page giving guidance on over-quote in citations? I saw Miscanthus giganteus with more than half of the article being citations. Tried to reduce & combine but got reverted.  — Chris Capoccia 💬 17:23, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Nothing that I can think of, other than WP:QUOTE itself and its overall message that we should really only include quotes when they're a) relevant or b) necessary. Neither of those are true on the article you link above, and I've restored your edits. Primefac (talk) 19:44, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

• I agree that we should discourage including quotations as part of citations. They are often (although not always) a red flag that the quote has been taken out of context. Blueboar (talk) 22:14, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Looking over your complaint and looking at the article in question, you should be advised that the problem with that article is that the citations are improperly done. Whomever created the citations clearly had no idea what he or she was doing. It is done more like an academic project than an encyclopedia. That article it is going to take a massive amount of work to repair. All of those long citations need to go and proper third-party citations need to replace them. I am exhausted just talking about it! I stumbled across this when I was looking up a precedent for an over-citing problem. The article on Sacha Baron Cohen had four citations after a sentence saying he is Jewish and three citations to confirm that he speaks Hebrew. One citation that does the job properly is all that is required. Perhaps I will turn my attention to this article that you’ve mentioned when time permits. God bless and happy editing! MarydaleEd (talk) 16:04, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Standards

The mere existence of this essay does a disservice to wikipedia. Once an *fD is launched, the standards for sourcing change dramatically to ridiculous lengths. What sourcing is appropriate under normal circumstances bears no resemblance to the high bar standards must achieve when a subject is under attack. WP:WIKILAWYERING takes place, applying every imaginable excuse for why existing sources should be ignored, including this essay. It is a war, and those who want to delete the article have only one mission, and that is not to make a sensible decision. It is to destroy. What is a WP:RS morphs into a highly restricted list of sources, essentially only those defined, by name, at the WP:RSNOTICEBOARD. Lesser known media, subject specialists or a mere paragraph in a long article or book are ignorable. The final defense of a subject is WP:GNG and even that numerically can turn this crowd of three ignorant monkeys into setting the bar at astounding heights, 5 sources, 10 sources, 20 sources; sometimes still not enough. The only way to beat them is to overwhelm them. Trackinfo (talk) 03:11, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm sorry you're frustrated. Notability is sometimes an awkward point in Wikipedia's work, with different people holding different views.

This essay opposes having a long string of citations at the end of the same sentence. If you feel a need for 20 sources in an article, is there any reason you wouldn't be able to write at least 10 sentences, and put (just) two sources after each sentence? WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:03, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

On any article I have been involved with, there has never been that utter lack of substance and over sourcing. I don't take on random articles of insignificance. What I do is WP:BEFORE and use those sources to construct a story, to avoid WP:BLP1E if nothing else. I don't get involved if there aren't sources. Sometimes as a reaction to some idiot voting delete, saying there is no coverage of a significant event, I might give 5 sources covering it as a reaction. I'm saying 20 sources for the article as a whole over multiple sections. I also follow appropriate subsections of WP:N. One memorable case, deletionists ganged up on an article to discredit, I believe, 17 sources over an expanse of this subject's career, and used that failure to wipe out a section of a notability standards on the basis that the 17 sources weren't good enough to prove general notability. That failure, that precedent keeps coming back. Once they smell the blood in the water, the launch of an *fD, these editors behave as sharks on an irrational path of destruction. Logic and sources be damned. If this were truly a collegial process, I would expect them to relent when confronted with . . . facts. But they don't back off. I seriously think they are competing for a prize for deleting the most content. And this essay gives them more ammunition. Trackinfo (talk) 02:55, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Deleting unnecessary sources is not the same as deleting content. However in most cases it is best to leave the citations to the content providers.--Kmhkmh (talk) 03:32, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Misuse to prove an obvious point and other sections

This is an odd section. Sometimes someones obvious fact is not so obvious to others (on a tangential note the blue sky analogy is rather silly as the sky is more likely to be either black, white, grey or red than blue). Misuse is quite a strong term for what is pretty common practice and really a relatively minor issue. I am not sure why GA class is singled out either; is it a response to a specific problem? In my experience this is not a major issue with overcites and doesn't really belong as the first section someone reads if it is worth keeping. The two biggest issues that I have come across regarding citation overkill are using multiple cites that say something to draw a general conclusion (i.e original research) or using a group of poor cites does to make a poorly sourced statement seem well sourced (i.e. reliability). Both of these are policy violations and are not mentioned here. There is also a spam aspect of just adding cites to get links to a website or source. I feel it could do with some reorganising. AIRcorn (talk) 04:09, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

"Extreme cases have seen fifteen or more footnotes after a single word,"

I looked around and couldn't find an example of that in fact occurring. I'm just wondering, have 15 footnotes ever occurred after 1 word?--Disoff (talk) 03:00, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

@Disoff: I assume it means footnotes to support one word in a sentence. The first example at Wikipedia:Citation overkill#Examples has 18 after "Europe" at [1]. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:29, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Woops @PrimeHunter: thanks!--Disoff (talk) 01:22, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

WP:Contort the citations suggests bundling and nesting them (own essay). HLHJ (talk) 06:16, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

@Disoff, PrimeHunter, and HLHJ: How about 51, that's more than 15. Depends, though, if you consider far-right one word, or two, and also, they're not consecutive, but tree-structured, with three at the top of the pyramid. See #Extreme overcite at Éric Zemmour. Mathglot (talk) 06:46, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Also, there are 19 footnotes after "Caucasus regions," (yes, after the comma) and over 20 after "long." (that is, after the full stop) in the same version. Alfa-ketosav (talk) 10:35, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

Bomb

cc: @QuackGuru:, @Flyer22 Frozen:, @Ktr101:, @Bearcat:, @SMcCandlish:, @Melecie:, @Nightscream:, @WhatamIdoing:

We should consider changing "Notability bomb" with a more neutral wording like "Superfluous" or "Hyper" or "Unwarranted"? And replace the image showing an aircraft dropping bombs, while we are it, too.

Thoughts? Murtaza.aliakbar (talk) 16:26, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Can you provide some concrete reasons why we should, instead of just asserting it as a given? Bearcat (talk) 16:29, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Setting aside the fact that the word Bomb has negative connotations associated with it is (as illustrated by use of shortcut WP:BOMBARDMENT and an image of an airstrike), I don't think it is appropriate name for the section. Here's the opening paragraph (emphasis mine):

Another common form of citation overkill is loading up an article with sources without regard as to whether they actually support substantive or noteworthy content about the topic. This may boost the number of footnotes and create a superficial appearance of notability, which can obscure a lack of substantive, reliable, and relevant information. This phenomenon is especially common in articles about people or organizations (including companies), given that they generally have to satisfy conditional notability standards based on achievement and sourceability, rather than mere verification of existence.

It may be just a few of us (or may be just me, for that matter), but having personally lived through hell, I am fairly uncomfortable with casual use of military or rather violent metaphors and images. Murtaza.aliakbar (talk) 17:30, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

I think the name of the section heading is less important the explanation in that section's text. And by virtue of that text, the metaphor and the image seem fine. Nightscream (talk) 17:54, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Then we can agree, given that the heading is relatively less important, changing it to an equivalent (better, non-violent) name and metaphor are acceptable if it can capture the "virtue of the text"? Something like, "Notability boost", "Notability pump", "Notability hoax", "Notability bluff", "Notability tax" etc.

If not, if the heading is still relatively important, then I'd say it mustn't be chosen without much thought, especially when the heading sets up the section for violent metaphors (such as equivalently inappropriate shortcuts, distressing images with witty captions to fit the narrative, etc).

If you do not agree that the metaphor is violent, regardless of how the context is shoe-horned into it, then I'd point to the fact that "bomb", if you haven't been subject to a literal one, evokes only harmless parallels of a militant (authors of a given non-notable article) carpet-bombing (with far too many refs) your territory (Wikipedia). That may not be the case for many reading and/or contributing to Wikipedia.

That said, I am aware that the word bomb is oft used by native English speakers to denote something as "in excess" or "unacceptable", like with terms F-bomb, N-bomb and so on. Though, I believe, there's no reason why better words cannot be used for prose when there's an opportunity to do so. Doubly so, because Wikipedia values neutrality and its community seeks to be inclusive. Murtaza.aliakbar (talk) 21:27, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

It's supposed to have a negative connotation. So do over-, superfluous, hyper-, unwarranted, superficial, boost (in this sense, i.e. of boosterism), pump (in this sense), hoax, bluff, tax, etc., etc. The entire point of this page is to not (that's a negative) engage in citation overkill. There is nothing wrong with the framing.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:04, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

All: I see that I may be a bit over-sensitive to it than most others, which is not okay, but I am also unable to convince anyone of that, which is okay. I don't really think a dispute resolution is warranted either. Thanks, really appreciate all your inputs. Murtaza.aliakbar (talk) 19:54, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

Murtaza.aliakbar, I agree that violent metaphors are overused. Etymologically, "bomb" is derived from and onomatopoeic word for a loud noise, from the same root as part of "bumble-bee", if that's any comfort. "Citation overkill" seems worse. And I'd quite like a less violent good metaphor for WP:Contort the citations than Procrustes. HLHJ (talk) 22:29, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Extreme overcite at Éric Zemmour

Please join the discussion at Talk:Éric Zemmour#OVERCITE problem in the lead; your feedback would be appreciated at this case of extreme overcitation. Or, just come and roll your eyes. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 06:42, 29 November 2021 (UTC)