How to Cite Wikipedia in APA 7th Edition

To cite Wikipedia in APA 7, put the article title first, then the date of the version you read, then "In Wikipedia," and end with the permanent link to that exact version. In the text, the article title replaces an author's name: ("Oil Painting," 2026). There is no author and no retrieval date, because the permanent link already pins down the version you used.

The format fits on one line. Getting it right is harder, because the permanent link is two clicks deep, the date is not the day you read the page, and the "Cite this page" tool on Wikipedia produces an entry that APA 7 does not accept. This guide works through all three, plus quoting a page with no page numbers, citing two articles at once, other wikis, and when you should cite the article's source instead of the article.

The official APA 7 rule

Wikipedia entries are covered in Section 10.3 of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.), with the dictionaries and encyclopedias. APA's Wikipedia entry reference page gives one template and notes that the guidance is new to the 7th edition.

Format:

Title of article. (Year, Month Day). In Wikipedia. URL of the archived version

APA's own example:

Oil painting. (2019, December 8). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oil_painting&oldid=929802398

Parenthetical citation: ("Oil Painting," 2019)

Narrative citation: "Oil Painting" (2019)

Each element has a rule behind it:

• Title in the author position. Wikipedia is written by its editors collectively, so there is no author to list. APA's rule for a work with no author (Section 9.4) moves the title to the front of the reference. Do not write "Wikipedia contributors" or "Anonymous" in its place.
• Sentence case in the reference. Capitalize the first word and proper nouns only. Wikipedia titles are usually in sentence case already ("Stanford prison experiment"), so you can copy them as they appear.
• Full date. The date is year, month, and day, and it is the date of the revision you read. APA's example is dated December 8, 2019, because that is when that version of the article was saved.
• "In Wikipedia." The word "In" is roman and the encyclopedia name is italic. Leave off the subtitle "The Free Encyclopedia."
• An archived URL. The link ends in oldid= and a number. That number identifies one saved version of the article, and it keeps working after the live article changes.

In the text, the title switches to title case and sits inside double quotation marks, with the comma inside the closing quotation mark. The quotation marks are there because an article is part of a larger work, the same way a chapter title would be. Our guide on citing a source with no author in APA 7 covers that title-in-place-of-author rule for other source types.

What changed from earlier editions

Wikipedia's own help page, Citing Wikipedia, still shows an older APA pattern that it ties to the 5th edition: "(n.d.)" in the date slot and a "Retrieved August 10, 2004, from" phrase before the link. Under the 7th edition both go. The revision date replaces "n.d.", and because the link points to an archived version, no retrieval date is needed. If your instructor hands you a template with "n.d." and "Retrieved," it predates the current manual.

How to find the permanent link and the right date

APA's instruction is to cite an archived version "so that readers can retrieve the version you used," and it tells you where to find one: select "View history," then the time and date of the version you used.

On the desktop site, the steps are:

1. Open the article and click View history at the top of the page.
2. Find the revision you read. If you read the article today and nobody has edited it since, that is the top line of the list.
3. Click the date and time on that line. The page reloads as that revision, and the address bar now ends in &oldid= followed by a number.
4. Copy that address into your reference.
5. Use the date on that line as the date in your reference.

There is a shortcut for the version you are looking at right now. In the Tools menu, Permanent link gives you the oldid address for the current revision in one click. The date of that revision is printed at the bottom of the article, in the line that begins "This page was last edited on."

Two details catch people out here.

The date is the date the revision was saved, not the date you read it. If you read the "Oil painting" article on October 12, 2026, the version on screen was saved on September 28, 2026, so the reference says (2026, September 28). Using the day you read it gives a date that matches no version of the article.

Revision times are listed in UTC unless you have set a time zone in a Wikipedia account. An edit saved late in the evening in the Americas can carry the next day's date. Use the date Wikipedia shows for the revision; that is the date a reader will see when they follow your link.

If you read the article weeks ago and did not save the link, open View history and pick the last revision saved before the day you read it. That is the version that was live when you read it. If the article was edited heavily in between, reread the claim you are citing in that revision to make sure it was there.

Worked examples

All the examples below use real articles and real revision numbers, so you can open each link and check the entry against the page.

1. A standard article

You read the current version of the "Oil painting" article. Its last revision was saved on September 28, 2026.

Reference:

Oil painting. (2026, September 28). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oil_painting&oldid=1377290426

Parenthetical: ("Oil Painting," 2026)

Narrative: The "Oil Painting" (2026) article traces the technique to the 7th century.

2. A title with proper nouns

Sentence case keeps proper nouns capitalized. The "Milgram experiment" article keeps the capital M in the reference and gains a capital E in the text.

Reference:

Milgram experiment. (2026, September 20). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Milgram_experiment&oldid=1375805270

Parenthetical: ("Milgram Experiment," 2026)

3. Quoting a passage with a paragraph number

Wikipedia articles have no page numbers. Section 8.28 of the Publication Manual gives you three alternatives for a direct quotation: a heading or section name, a paragraph number (counted by hand if the paragraphs are not numbered), or a heading combined with a paragraph number. APA's page on quoting material without page numbers shows each one.

For a quotation from the article's opening paragraph, a paragraph number is enough:

Oil paint has been "the most common technique for artistic painting on canvas, wood panel, or copper for several centuries" ("Oil Painting," 2026, para. 1).

Count only the paragraphs of body text. Skip the infobox, image captions, and any maintenance banners at the top of the article.

4. Quoting from a section further down

Deep in a long article, counting paragraphs from the top is error-prone. Name the section and count from its heading instead:

The study "raised immediate controversy about the research ethics of scientific experimentation" ("Milgram Experiment," 2026, Ethics section, para. 1).

You can shorten a long section heading in the citation. The reference entry stays the same: it is for the whole article, not the section, which is the point APA makes about citing part of a webpage.

5. Paraphrasing

A paraphrase needs only the title and year. A locator is allowed but optional, and it helps when the article runs to dozens of sections.

The technique displaced egg tempera for panel painting in most of Europe by the height of the Renaissance ("Oil Painting," 2026).

6. Two Wikipedia articles in one citation

List them in the same order they appear in the reference list, which for authorless works means alphabetical by title, separated by a semicolon:

("Milgram Experiment," 2026; "Stanford Prison Experiment," 2026)

Each article gets its own reference entry with its own revision date and link. The Stanford prison experiment entry for the version saved on October 8, 2026, is:

Stanford prison experiment. (2026, October 8). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stanford_prison_experiment&oldid=1379161210

7. A wiki with no permanent links

APA says to use the same format "to cite any wiki page," and adds a fallback: if a wiki does not provide permanent links to archived versions, include the URL for the entry and a retrieval date. A retrieval date follows APA's general format from the elements of reference list entries page, which says to include one only when a work is unarchived and designed to change over time.

Format:

Title of entry. (Year, Month Day). In Name of Wiki. Retrieved Month Day, Year, from URL

If the page shows no date at all, write "n.d." in the date slot, and our guide to citing a website in APA 7 covers the rest of the webpage rules. Wikipedia itself always has permanent links, so this fallback never applies to a Wikipedia article. Leaving the retrieval date on a Wikipedia reference that already has an oldid link is redundant.

8. A version you did not read today

You read the "Milgram experiment" article in mid-September for a draft and are now writing the reference list. View history shows revisions saved on September 15, 17, and 18, 2026. You read it on September 16. The version that was live on that day is the September 15 revision, so that is the one to cite:

Milgram experiment. (2026, September 15). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Milgram_experiment&oldid=1375113579

Fixing the "Cite this page" output

Every Wikipedia article has a Cite this page link in its Tools menu. It generates entries in several styles, and its own help text says it is "still your responsibility to ensure the citation meets all requirements." For APA, that warning matters. Here is what the tool produced for the "Oil painting" article on October 12, 2026:

Wikipedia contributors. (2026, September 28). Oil painting. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 00:27, October 12, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oil_painting&oldid=1377290426

And the APA 7 version of the same reference:

Oil painting. (2026, September 28). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oil_painting&oldid=1377290426

Four edits turn one into the other:

1. Delete "Wikipedia contributors." and move the article title to the front.
2. Shorten Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia to Wikipedia.
3. Delete the whole "Retrieved ... from" phrase, including the time.
4. Keep the date and the oldid link exactly as the tool gave them. Those two parts are correct, and they save you the trip to View history.

The in-text citation changes with the reference. The tool's version would lead you to write (Wikipedia contributors, 2026), which a marker will read as a formatting error; the APA 7 citation is ("Oil Painting," 2026).

Should you cite Wikipedia, or its source?

APA's Wikipedia page tells students to ask their professor whether Wikipedia is an appropriate source, and it gives the reason: Wikipedia reports information from other sources, which makes it a secondary source. Wikipedia's own help page agrees and suggests the alternative of citing the reliable source an article draws on.

APA's rule for secondary sources (Section 8.6) is to cite them sparingly and, where possible, to find, read, and cite the original work. The "Milgram experiment" article shows how this plays out. Its Ethics section says that Diana Baumrind criticized the study in a 1964 article in American Psychologist. If that criticism is what you want to use, find the article Wikipedia names and cite it directly:

Baumrind, D. (1964). Some thoughts on ethics of research: After reading Milgram's "Behavioral Study of Obedience." American Psychologist, 19(6), 421–423. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040128

In-text: (Baumrind, 1964)

Many journal articles cited on Wikipedia are available through your library's databases; the footnote at the end of the Wikipedia sentence usually gives the DOI or enough detail to search for it.

If you cannot get the original, APA's secondary-source format applies. Name the original in the text and add "as cited in" followed by the work you actually read. Only the work you read goes in the reference list:

(Baumrind, 1964, as cited in "Milgram Experiment," 2026)

That citation is honest about what you read, but it is weak evidence in a paper, because it rests on an article anyone can edit. Use it as a last resort.

There are cases where citing the Wikipedia article itself is the right call. Wikipedia's help page names two: research about Wikipedia (its policies, its editing, its coverage), where the article is a primary source, and topics so obscure that Wikipedia has the only available account. Citing an article for a definition or background fact is a judgment call that depends on your instructor; the format above works either way.

Special cases

Two versions of the same article in one paper

If you cite two different revisions of one article from the same year, the references share a title and a year. APA does not show this case for Wikipedia. The defensible choice is the general rule for two works with the same author element and the same year: add lowercase letters after the year (2026a, 2026b) and order the entries by date. Better still, cite one version throughout, so a reader checks every claim against the same text.

The article was renamed after you read it

The oldid link still opens the revision you read, under the title it had then. Use that title in your reference, since it matches what a reader will see at your link.

Images from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons

A photograph or diagram on a Wikipedia page usually has its own creator and license, listed on its file page on Wikimedia Commons. Cite the image as an image, crediting the person who made it, and not as the Wikipedia article. The figure note and reference entry are in the APA 7 image citation guide.

Other wikis

Fan wikis, company wikis, and Wiktionary all follow the same pattern: entry title, date, "In" plus the wiki's name in italics, and a link. Check whether the wiki has a history page with stable revision links. Many wikis run on the same software as Wikipedia and offer an oldid link the same way; when one does, use it and skip the retrieval date. When it does not, use the fallback in example 7.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

• Using the live article URL. The address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_painting shows whatever the article says today. A reader who follows it next month may find the passage you quoted rewritten or gone. Use the oldid link instead.
• Dating the reference to the day you read it. The reference date is the revision date. Take it from View history or from the "last edited" line at the bottom of the article.
• Keeping "Wikipedia contributors" as the author. It comes from the Cite this page tool. APA 7 leaves the author out and moves the title to the front.
• Adding a retrieval date to an archived link. The retrieval date exists for pages that change and cannot be archived. A permanent link has already solved that problem.
• Italicizing the article title. In the reference, the article title is plain and Wikipedia is italic. In the text, the article title goes in quotation marks.
• Leaving the title in sentence case in the text. The reference says "Milgram experiment"; the in-text citation says "Milgram Experiment."
• Citing a fact Wikipedia took from a better source. If the sentence you need has a footnote, read the footnoted source and cite that. See the section on secondary sources above.
• Filing the entry under "W." An authorless reference is alphabetized by the first significant word of its title, so "Oil painting" files under O, wherever Wikipedia appears. Our guide to APA reference list order covers the full sorting rules.

Quick-reference table