How to Fact Check a wikiHow Article

Co-authored by Gerald Posner

Last Updated: February 4, 2025

Reviewing wikiHow articles for accuracy can be a fun and interesting way to make sure that wikiHow is providing useful information to visitors. With a little time and some careful reading and research, you can make sure that the instructions, tips, and warnings in a wikiHow are accurate and reference the appropriate sources.

If you would like to help review accuracy, please go to Accuracy Patrol or the Accuracy Category. See How to Review Accuracy on wikiHow for more details.

Steps

Click on the "Edit" drop down menu, and then click on "Article Stats".
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Understand that an article's accuracy rating is the current, cumulative result of the unscientific survey at the bottom of each page asking readers whether the article is accurate. This score is meant to serve as an indicator only, and may not reflect the latest updates to this article. Some accurate articles may have low accuracy scores. Do not just automatically assume all articles with bad scores are inaccurate. You are an editor and will need to use your best editorial judgment! Some reasons accurate articles frequently get low scores include:
- Old versions of the article were inaccurate, and the article was later improved, but the old accuracy scores were not cleared.
- Controversial topics, social or political issues (e.g., abortion, global warming, prayer in schools)
- Highly subjective topics (e.g., How to Be Popular or how to be like a character in a book or movie)?
- Difficult skill/difficult actions - "How to Spin a Pencil Around Your Thumb" and other difficult topics are given low scores by readers who fail to master the skill.
- Past featured articles. Oddly, when an article becomes featured, grievers who read wikiHow like to come in and vote low accuracy. Take those with a grain of salt unless the discussion demonstrates real evidence of inaccuracy.
- The title of the article uses words such as "Best," "Perfect," "Ideal" or other absolute terms that no article can possibly live up to.
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Read the article and the discussion pages carefully.
- Pay attention to all of the important information in the article. Problems with steps, tips, things you'll need or warnings can all make the article inaccurate.
Discussion pages very often will contain useful information about potential problems with an article. Some visitors to wikiHow may not be comfortable editing articles themselves and will instead leave notes on the discussion pages about inaccuracies. These comments can be very helpful leads when improving articles.
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Use research sources to get better information . What you are trying to do with this step is to find the most authoritative sources you can on the contents of the article to determine how effective the article is.
- Start by entering the title of the article in a web search engine and choose the most trusted results. Wikipedia may be a good place to start first, but you must not end your search there. Look at the references in Wikipedia for original source materials. Find and use these references rather than Wikipedia itself when accuracy is in question.
- Good sources are people and publications who are authorities in a given field. For example, if you were researching whether you should use a cotton swab to clean your ears, a good reference might be found here and be written by a physician who specializes in caring for ears. This is a good source for two reasons:
  - The information comes from an expert source,
  - The expert wrote the article himself/herself. As much as possible, avoid using summaries of articles; the best references are as close to the original source as possible.
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Compare the content of the wikiHow article with several of the best sources you can find. Hopefully, there are no real inaccuracies in the wikiHow article. If there are problems, you need to correct them.
- For many wikiHows, there may be one way of doing them that is clearly the correct one. In this case, you should find many articles stating the same thing. Pick the best one and use this as a reference.
- For others, there may be no clearly established correct way of doing it. In this case, it may not be possible to provide good references for every step; you should still seek as much verifiable information as possible.
- For articles where there is no clear best or right way to accomplish the goal, a good practice is to break the article up to show the various methods. You can accomplish this by using subheadings like "===Method 1===...===Method 2===" or other more descriptive terms. Provide citations for each method.
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Edit the article, remove inaccurate information, add verifiable facts and reference as much information as possible.
- If the article is correct but does not have good sources for its instructions, add the appropriate references.
- If the article has a problematic title (e.g., How to do a Perfect Backflip Every Time), search for a simpler version (e.g., How to Do a Backflip). Apply the {{title}} or {{merge}} tags as needed.
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After completing the above steps do one of the following steps:
- Clear the accuracy ratings after improving the page.
- Write {{accuracy}} on the page if you aren't able to make the corrections, but think another editor could. Describe on the discussion page exactly what you believe the problem is.
- If, after extensive review, you feel there is no way this page could be improved; nominate the page for deletion by writing {{nfd|acc}} on the article and then leaving a note on the discussion page explaining your reasoning and the fact that other options to keep the article have been explored and exhausted.
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Tips

Don't worry about not being able to find a single reference that provides good information on every step in an article. By using the reference format it is easy to show the correct reference for a given step.

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Finding good sources is especially important for controversial articles. By finding a good source for potentially controversial information, you may be able to help avoid edit wars.

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Especially for controversial articles, try to avoid using references from sources that are clearly biased about the issue. If you are writing an article about how to convince people that global warming isn't real, your best source might not be from a website dedicated to showing global warming is a fraud. Instead, find original materials from other sources that don't have such a strong opinion on the issue.

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Warnings

Sometimes cultural considerations need to be taken into account; something may "appear" to be inaccurate to someone in one country, when it is a norm or standard in another country. Sometimes this can be as simple as using different terminology, so take care with this.

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Recipes are notorious for differences of opinion as to their accuracy or otherwise. Many things can affect the success of a recipe. These range from not following the measurements accurately, to substituting ingredients, to a difference in regional altitudes for each cook. Keep this in mind when reviewing recipes.

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