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Hello.

I’m a new wikiHow member, although I’m an avid reader of the site. I’m not new to proofreading or editing but I am new to wikiHow’s particular methods and I’d like you guys’ help with a quick question.

I was recently fixing some minor spelling mistakes in this article about how to remove sweat stains from sheets.

At the bottom, it proudly states that the article was co-authored by wikiHow’s trained team of editors and that, together, they cited 24 references. However, when I looked at the references, there were a few “duplicates.”

References [1], [3], [4] & [6] all link to the same decoist.com page.

References [2], [5], [7], [19] & [21] all link to the same  esquire.com page.

References [8], [14], [15], [17] & [23] all link to the same  styleathome.com page.

References [10], [11], [13], [16] & [18] all link to the same  housecleaningcentral.com page.

References [20] & [22] both link to the same  remodelista.com page.

That brings the number of unique citations down to just eight. In other words, two thirds of the citations are ‘duplicates’.

It is my experience (as a physics lab assistant) that references are given a number the first time they are cited, and then the *same* number every time thereafter.

My question is, does wikiHow also follow this method, or are ‘duplicate’ citations encouraged?

Many thanks,

Ross

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Hello, welcome to wikiHow. It is okay to use the same reference more than once in an article if it is relevant. But I think that they are suppose to use the same number for the same references, so the different numbering could be a bug. But I’m not sure, I’ll ping @Anna and @JayneG to see if they know the answer.

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@Rbstrachan Welcome - good question! You must have prior wiki experience, eh?

We actually don’t remove citations that are used multiple times or reuse the same ref tag (and therefore number) for duplicate references here - this is by design, because we found over the years that, when pages got edited later on, if the first reference was removed, it created gaps, orphaned citations, and confusion for readers when it came to later mentions of the reference. So all good on that page – it’s okay for there to be duplicates, since they’re still letting the reader know where specific bits of advice came from throughout the text. Glad you checked, though!

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Perhaps the article details shown at the top of the articles should give the number of unique references? Otherwise, false credibility is given to the article.

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Perhaps! Refs in general are not an engineering priority right now, but an improved experience isn’t out of the question in future - Our dev team has lots of ideas for how to improve the references section in general, like maybe displaying them in a way that separates the domain from the page/article title for easier skimming and digestion (easier said than done when you’re trying to extract info from an outside web page, though, so we’ll see!), using a column format or other more pleasing layouts, etc etc. Changes in that area have taken a bit of a backburner to the upgrade and the next big project, the responsive redesign, but I could imagine them being a bigger focus again at some point down the line. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

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@Anna @R2_d2000

Thank you for your help, much appreciated.