23

Wikipedia's entry on citing Wikipedia says that APA formatting requires that their page on plagiarism be formatted as:

Plagiarism. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved August 10, 2004, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism

In particular, the APA format requires the article name to take the place of the author.

To cite Wikipedia with BibTeX, they say to use the code:

@misc{ wiki:###,
   author = "Wikipedia",
   title = "Plagiarism --- {W}ikipedia{,} The Free Encyclopedia",
   year = "2004",
   url = "\url{http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plagiarism&oldid=5139350}",
   note = "[Online; accessed 22-July-2004]"
 }

This however, puts Wikipedia as the author, among other things (and is therefore not in APA format).

The package I am using is apacite and the code I have for my bibliography is:

\usepackage{apacite}
\bibliographystyle{apacite}
\bibliography{FinalRoughDraft}

I have tried things like setting putting the title of the article in the author = ... field, but if I put, say, author = Estimation lemma, the output in the author position is "lemma, E." I have also tried putting quotation marks around the title, but this does not work either.

Is there any way to get around this?

Qrrbrbirlbel
  • 119,821
Michael Zhao
  • 355

2 Answers2

32

Let's have a TeX and a BIB file:

Code

wiki.tex

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{url,apacite}    % package url to prevent horrible linebreaks
\bibliographystyle{apacite}
\begin{document}
\cite{wiki:xxx}
\bibliography{wiki}
\end{document}

wiki.bib

@misc{ wiki:xxx,
  author = {{Estimation lemma}},
  title = "Estimation lemma --- {W}ikipedia{,} The Free Encyclopedia",
  year = "2010",
  url = "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Estimation_lemma&oldid=375747928",
  note = "[Online; accessed 29-September-2012]"
}

Output

compiled example

Notes

Notice the use of double braces: {{Estimation lemma}}.
The inner pair hides these two words from BibTeX so that it only "sees" one string.

Qrrbrbirlbel
  • 119,821
  • Thank you! This is much simpler than the solution I finally came up with. After I posted this question, I toyed with the code a bit I tried inserting \hspace{4pt} between "Estimation" and "lemma". It worked, but I think this is much simpler lol – Michael Zhao Sep 29 '12 at 04:32
  • What should be the entry at year? I notice that the year is different from the date and year of online access? Does the later indicate the date on which I am opening that page on Wikipedia? – Alice Nov 30 '20 at 13:06
0

Here's what I do for APA 7th Wikipedia formatting:

Add the following (from this answer) to suppress the "Retrieved from" text that comes from apacite:

\usepackage{apacite}
\AtBeginDocument{\renewcommand{\BRetrievedFrom}{}}  % remove "Retrieved from" for reference links

then format your Wikipedia article like this:

@misc{website:ZookeeperWiki,
    author       = {{Apache ZooKeeper}},
    month        = {December},
    day          = {1},
    url          = {https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Apache_ZooKeeper&oldid=992755046},
    year         = {2019},
    howpublished = {In \textit{Wikipedia}},
}

Citation should look like:

Apache ZooKeeper. (2019, December 1). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Apache_ZooKeeper&oldid=992755046

MilleCodex
  • 111