Guide
Writing Wikipedia citation templates that pass review
Wikipedia articles live or die by their sources, and the citation templates are how those sources are recorded. A well-formed template lets readers find the source, lets bots repair dead links, and keeps the reference list consistent. This generator writes the wikitext for you from a short form, a DOI, an ISBN or an existing reference file.
Picking the right template
Use {{cite web}} for web pages that are not news, {{cite news}} for newspapers, magazines and news agencies, {{cite journal}} for academic articles, {{cite book}} for books and {{cite AV media}} for videos, films and broadcasts. Each has its own parameters: news sources have a work (the paper’s name), journals a journal, volume and issue, books a publisher, location, edition and isbn.
Authors and dates
People are written as last1, first1, last2, first2 and so on, which is what Wikipedia’s citation bots and the Harvard-style short footnotes expect. An organisation as author goes in author. Dates follow the article’s convention: day-month-year (29 October 2026), month-day-year (October 29, 2026) or ISO (2026-10-29). Most articles say which near the top with {{Use dmy dates}} or {{Use mdy dates}}.
Access dates and archives
Online sources should carry an access-date, the day you read them. Because links rot, add an archived copy too: save the page in the Wayback Machine, paste the archive address, and the template gains archive-url, archive-date and url-status=live. If the original later disappears, an editor only has to change url-status to dead.
Filling the form faster
Paste a DOI to fetch a journal article’s details from Crossref, or an ISBN to fetch a book from Open Library; only that number is sent. If you already have the source in a reference manager, paste its BibTeX, RIS or CSL-JSON at the bottom and press the import button.
Ref tags and reuse
By default the template is wrapped in <ref> tags, ready to paste after the sentence it supports. Switch on a named ref and the tag gains a name built from the surname and year, such as Raman2025; the tool shows the short form to reuse later. Turn on “One parameter per line” for long templates that are easier to edit vertically.
A worked example
A WHO fact sheet published on 26 June 2024, read on 29 October 2026, produces {{cite web |date=26 June 2024 |title=Physical activity |website=World Health Organization |url=… |access-date=29 October 2026}}. Switching the date format to mdy changes both dates to “June 26, 2024” and “October 29, 2026”.
What makes a citation useful to other editors
A citation should let someone else find the exact source and check the claim. That means the specific page or article, not a home page; the author and date where they exist; and the publisher or website so readers can judge reliability. For books, add the page number that supports the sentence. For paywalled journals, a DOI is better than a URL because it keeps working when the publisher’s site changes.
Common problems the template avoids
Bare URLs in ref tags, dates in mixed formats, and titles copied with the site name stuck on the end are the usual reasons bots and reviewers tag a reference. Filling the fields separately keeps the title clean and the date consistent, and a pipe character inside a value is written as {{!}} so it cannot break the template.
Related tools
Format the same sources for an essay with the Citation Generator or a full list with the Bibliography Formatter, turn spreadsheet data into a wikitable with CSV to MediaWiki, or convert reference files with the BibTeX Converter.
Checked against the current version of the Wikipedia Citation Template Generator on .