How to Cite Wikipedia in MLA 9th Edition

To cite Wikipedia in MLA 9th edition, start with the article title in quotation marks, then the site name in italics, the publisher (Wikimedia Foundation), the date the article was last edited, and the URL. In the text, cite the article by its title, because Wikipedia articles have no single author: ("Photosynthesis"). An access date at the end is optional in MLA 9, but most library guides add one for Wikipedia, and the reason has to do with how often the articles change.

"Photosynthesis." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 8 Oct. 2026, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Photosynthesis&oldid=1379238357. Accessed 29 Oct. 2026.

That one entry covers most of what you need. The rest of this guide explains each choice in it: why there is no author, which date to use, why the URL above looks different from the one in your browser, and what to do when the article you read has since been rewritten, renamed or shares its title with a page on another site.

The official MLA 9 rule

MLA does not have a separate Wikipedia template. You fill in the same core elements you use for every source, in the same order: author, title of source, title of container, other contributors, version, number, publisher, publication date, location. A Wikipedia article uses five of them.

Format:

"Title of Article." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, Day Month Year, URL. Accessed Day Month Year.

The MLA shows this pattern in its own answer on making links in works-cited entries accessible, published in January 2025 for the ninth edition, where the Shakespeare article appears as "William Shakespeare." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 20 Dec. 2024. Older MLA answers written for the eighth edition use the same order, so nothing changed between editions for this source.

Here is what each element does in a Wikipedia entry:

Why there is no author

Every Wikipedia article has hundreds of editors, most of them under usernames. The MLA's answer on citing entries in reference works says to begin with the author's name if an entry is signed and to begin with the title if it is unsigned. Wikipedia articles are unsigned, so the title moves into the first slot. Do not write "Wikipedia contributors" or "Anonymous" in its place. Wikipedia's own citation tool prints "Wikipedia contributors", which is one of several things it gets wrong for MLA 9 (see the section on fixing that output below).

The container title

The MLA's examples give the container as Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Many library guides shorten it to Wikipedia. The Douglas College MLA 9 guide, for example, cites "Donna Strickland." Wikipedia, 9 Oct. 2021. Both are defensible. The longer form matches the MLA's own practice; the shorter form matches the name in the browser tab. Pick one and use it for every Wikipedia entry in the same paper.

The publisher

The MLA's examples include Wikimedia Foundation as the publisher. The Douglas College guide leaves it out. MLA 9 lets you skip the publisher when it is essentially the same as the site name, and "Wikimedia Foundation" is not the same as "Wikipedia", which is the reason to keep it. If your instructor hands you a model entry without it, follow the model.

The date

Use the date the article was last edited. The MLA's guidance on web pages with more than one date is to cite the one most meaningful to your use of the source, which for a page that changes constantly is the latest revision. Wikipedia prints that date at the bottom of every article ("This page was last edited on..."). Write it day, month, year, with the month abbreviated: 8 Oct. 2026, 7 May 2026, 1 Aug. 2026. May, June and July are not abbreviated; September is Sept.

The access date

MLA 9 makes the access date optional. The Douglas College guide quotes the ninth-edition handbook (p. 211): an access date "should be provided if the work lacks a publication date" or if the work is likely to be revised or deleted, and it names Wikipedia articles as the example. A Wikipedia article has a date, but it is also the clearest case of a work that is revised without notice, so adding "Accessed" plus the date costs you one short element and tells your reader which day's version you saw. Put it at the very end of the entry, after the URL.

How to find the date and the permanent link

The date and the URL both come from the page itself, and the article you are reading will probably change before your instructor reads your paper. Wikipedia keeps every version, so you can point straight at the one you used.

1. Find the last-edited date. Scroll to the bottom of the article. The footer reads "This page was last edited on 8 October 2026, at 19:44." Ignore the time; MLA needs only the day.
2. Get the permanent link. Open the Tools menu (top right on desktop) and choose Permanent link. The address bar changes from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis to a longer address ending in &oldid= and a number. That number identifies one revision. Wikipedia's help page on permanent links explains that it "leads to the text as it was at that point in time", with one catch: images and infoboxes on the page can still update.
3. Copy the URL and drop the protocol. The handbook says you can usually omit http:// or https:// (pp. 195-96, as quoted in the Douglas College guide). Keep the protocol if you want the link clickable and your software will not make a link without it.
4. Write down today's date for the optional access element.

Why bother with the permanent link? The handbook advises copying the URL from your browser unless the source offers a URL it identifies as stable or permanent, and Wikipedia offers exactly that. The University of Michigan Library's guide to citing Wikipedia makes the same point from the reader's side: "citing a simple URL to a Wikipedia entry is not sufficient for people to see the exact same text that you are citing." If you quote a sentence that an editor deletes next week, the plain URL leads your reader to a page where the quotation is missing. The permanent link leads to the page you quoted.

The plain article URL is not wrong in MLA 9. Some instructors prefer it because it is shorter. If you use it, the access date matters more, because it is the only clue to which version you read.

Worked examples

Every example below uses a real article and a real revision number, checked on 29 October 2026. Each one shows the works-cited entry, then the in-text citation.

1. A standard article with a permanent link

"Photosynthesis." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 8 Oct. 2026, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Photosynthesis&oldid=1379238357. Accessed 29 Oct. 2026.

Parenthetical: ("Photosynthesis")

Narrative: The Wikipedia article "Photosynthesis" describes...

2. The same article with the ordinary URL

"Photosynthesis." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 8 Oct. 2026, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis. Accessed 29 Oct. 2026.

The in-text citation does not change. Only the location element is different, and here the access date is doing real work: it is the only thing tying the entry to the version you saw.

3. An article about a person

"Rosalind Franklin." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 26 Oct. 2026, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rosalind_Franklin&oldid=1382040127. Accessed 29 Oct. 2026.

Parenthetical: ("Rosalind Franklin")

Franklin is the subject, not the author, so her name stays inside the quotation marks. Putting "Franklin, Rosalind." at the start of the entry tells your reader she wrote the article.

4. A title with a disambiguation tag

Wikipedia adds a word in parentheses when several things share a name: "Mercury (planet)", "Mercury (element)". MLA capitalizes English titles headline-style, according to its answer on why titles are capitalized, so the tag gets a capital in your entry:

"Mercury (Planet)." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 19 Oct. 2026, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mercury_(planet)&oldid=1381089194. Accessed 29 Oct. 2026.

The parenthetical citation needs one more adjustment. MLA does not nest parentheses inside parentheses; its answer on titles that contain parentheses says to switch the inner ones to square brackets: ("Mercury [Planet]"). Leave the URL exactly as Wikipedia prints it, lowercase and all.

5. An article whose title is the name of a book

When the article is about a novel, the article title is also a book title. MLA styles a title within a title by its own rules, whatever the source does, according to its answer on book titles inside other titles. The novel's name stays in italics inside the quotation marks:

"The Great Gatsby." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 27 Oct. 2026, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Great_Gatsby&oldid=1382253783. Accessed 29 Oct. 2026.

In a formatted paper, The Great Gatsby is italic inside the quotation marks. Plain text cannot show the italics, so check this one by eye after pasting. Parenthetical: ("Great Gatsby"). For concision, shorten a title in parentheses to its noun phrase and drop the leading article, the way the Purdue OWL MLA in-text guide shortens To the Lighthouse to Lighthouse.

6. An older version of an article

Sometimes you read an article weeks ago and it has been edited since. Open the article's View history tab, find the revision from the day you read it, and click its date. That opens the old version with its own oldid URL. Use the date of that revision in the entry, not today's last-edited date:

"Pendragon." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 7 May 2026, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pendragon&oldid=1353037163.

This one has no access date, which is fine. The permanent link already fixes the version.

7. Two articles with the same title on different sites

If your works-cited list has a "Harry Houdini" article from Wikipedia and another from Encyclopedia.com, the parenthetical ("Harry Houdini") points at both. The MLA's answer on identical titles with no authors adds the first piece of information that tells them apart, usually the site name, in square brackets:

"Harry Houdini." Encyclopedia.com, 2016, www.encyclopedia.com/people/literature-and-arts/theater-biographies/harry-houdini. "Harry Houdini." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 20 Feb. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Houdini.

In-text: ("Harry Houdini" [Wikipedia]) and ("Harry Houdini" [Encyclopedia.com]). Those two entries are the MLA's own example, dates included.

8. Several Wikipedia articles in one paper

Each article gets its own entry. The MLA's answer on encyclopedia entries uses Wikipedia as its example: you cite each article separately, even though they all come from the same site. Alphabetize them by article title along with the rest of your list; the MLA 9 alphabetizing guide covers how titles beginning with "The" or a number are sorted.

The same MLA answer shows the in-text pattern for a quotation: According to Wikipedia, an encyclopedia "is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge from either all branches or from a particular field or discipline" ("Encyclopedia").

In-text citations for Wikipedia

Wikipedia has no page numbers, so the parenthetical citation is the article title and nothing else. The handbook is explicit that when a source has no page numbers, "no number should be given in a parenthetical citation" (p. 248, quoted in the Douglas College guide). Do not invent "n. pag.", count paragraphs or add a section name.

Put the title in quotation marks, because it names a short work inside a larger one. Shorten a long title to a noun phrase that starts with the word your entry is alphabetized under. "List of Nobel laureates in Physics" can become ("List of Nobel Laureates"), because your reader scans the list for the first word.

A narrative citation names the article in your sentence instead, and then no parenthetical is needed for a source with no page numbers:

• Parenthetical: Franklin's X-ray images were central to the 1953 model of DNA ("Rosalind Franklin").
• Narrative: The Wikipedia article "Rosalind Franklin" credits her X-ray images...

For more on choosing between the two forms, see our complete guide to in-text citations.

Fixing Wikipedia's "Cite this page" output

Every article has a Cite this page link in the Tools menu. It produces an entry labeled "MLA Style Manual". Here is what it printed for the Pendragon article on 29 October 2026:

Wikipedia contributors. "Pendragon." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 7 May. 2026. Web. 29 Oct. 2026.

That is the seventh-edition format, which MLA replaced in 2016. Five things need fixing:

1. Delete "Wikipedia contributors." The entry should start with the title.
2. Replace the repeated site name in the publisher slot with Wikimedia Foundation, and put a comma after the italic container title, not a period.
3. Remove the period after "May". May is never abbreviated, so it takes no period.
4. Delete "Web." MLA 9 does not label the medium.
5. Add the URL. The tool leaves it out of the MLA version entirely, though it prints the permanent link in the bibliographic details right above. Copy that link into the location slot and move the access date after it, with "Accessed" in front.

The corrected entry is the one in worked example 6, plus "Accessed 29 Oct. 2026." if you want the access date. The MLA's own advice on citation generators is to check any generated entry against the handbook, and for Wikipedia's built-in tool every item on that list has to be changed by hand.

Should you cite Wikipedia or the source behind it?

MLA has a format for Wikipedia, but your instructor may not accept it. MLA gives no rule on whether you should cite it; that is a course decision. Wikipedia's own Cite this page screen warns that most educators do not consider an encyclopedia appropriate as a sole source and suggests using articles "for background information, as a reference for correct terminology and search terms, and as a starting point for further research." The Michigan library guide takes the same line: use it as a starting point that leads to "more reliable and rigorous scholarly texts."

The practical move is to follow the footnote. Every factual claim in a well-maintained Wikipedia article carries a superscript number linking to its source: a journal article, a book, a news report. Open it, confirm the claim there, and cite that source in the format for its type. A footnote pointing to a journal article becomes a journal article citation in MLA 9; a footnote pointing to a book becomes a book entry.

There are three situations where citing Wikipedia itself is the honest choice:

• Wikipedia is your subject. A paper about how an article on a contested topic changed over time, or about Wikipedia's editing culture, cites the article and its revisions directly.
• You quote its wording. If the sentence you quote is Wikipedia's prose, cite Wikipedia.
• You could not get the original. If the source in the footnote is paywalled, out of print or in a language you cannot read, and you rely on Wikipedia's summary of it, cite Wikipedia and name the original in your sentence. For a quotation that Wikipedia itself quotes, MLA uses "qtd. in", as the Purdue OWL explains: (qtd. in "Rosalind Franklin"). Use this sparingly. One indirect citation is fine; several in a paper suggests you have not done the reading.

Do not cite the original source as if you read it when you only read Wikipedia's account of it. If the footnote's details turn out to be wrong, the mistake is now yours.

Special cases

An article in another language

Cite the language edition you actually read. The title stays in its original language, and MLA capitalizes titles in languages other than English sentence-style, per the same capitalization answer as above. The site name is the one that edition displays: the French edition calls itself Wikipédia.

"Photosynthèse." Wikipédia, Wikimedia Foundation, 1 Aug. 2026, fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Photosynth%C3%A8se&oldid=238282939. Accessed 29 Oct. 2026.

The URL here uses the percent-encoded form, Photosynth%C3%A8se, which is what most browsers copy. Some copy the accented letter as it is. Either works. If you translate a passage into English yourself, say so in your sentence; whether you also add an English translation of the title is a question for your instructor, since this guide could not confirm the MLA 9 wording on that point.

An image from Wikimedia Commons

Pictures in Wikipedia articles are usually hosted on Wikimedia Commons. The MLA's 2025 answer on citing a Wikimedia picture of an artwork says to cite the work itself and treat Wikimedia as the container. It also recommends the commons.wikimedia.org file page over the upload.wikimedia.org image address:

Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder. Children's Games. 1560. Wikimedia, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_Children%E2%80%99s_Games_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg.

Children's Games is italic in a formatted paper. If the image is not in the public domain and you reproduce it, credit it and note the permissions.

The article was renamed or merged

Articles get renamed, and the old title then redirects to the new one. Cite the title shown on the page when you read it. A permanent link keeps the old title in the URL, so your reader lands on the version you saw. If you only have the plain URL and the page now carries a new title, revisit it, use the current title, and update the date.

A digital-only paper with linked titles

If your paper will only be read on screen, MLA allows a hyperlinked title in place of a printed URL. The accessible-links answer drops the URL from the location slot and links the article title instead, which is why its Wikipedia example ends at the date. Two Wikipedia articles with the same title need different link text, so add the next element to the link. For a printed paper, keep the URL.

A Wikipedia article that is the topic, cited across versions

Comparing two revisions of one article? Give each its own entry, each with its own date and permanent link. The titles are identical, so in the text tell them apart by date in your sentence ("the 7 May 2026 revision of 'Pendragon'") or, in parentheses, with a bracketed distinguishing detail as in worked example 7.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

• "Wikipedia contributors" as the author. It comes from the Cite this page tool and from APA-style habits. MLA begins an unsigned entry with the title.
• Writing the subject as the author. "Franklin, Rosalind." at the start of the entry claims she wrote the article. Her name belongs inside the quoted title.
• Using the date you read it as the publication date. The publication date is the last-edited date from the page footer. The day you read it goes in the optional access date at the end.
• "Web." at the end. A leftover from the seventh edition. Delete it.
• "(Wikipedia)" as the in-text citation. Your reader needs the first word of the works-cited entry, which is the article title. ("Wikipedia") matches nothing in your list.
• One entry for all your Wikipedia articles. Each article is a separate source and gets a separate entry.
• A page or paragraph number in the parenthetical. Wikipedia has none; the handbook says to give none.
• A lowercase disambiguation tag in the title. "Mercury (planet)" becomes "Mercury (Planet)" in the entry, and the parentheses become brackets in the in-text citation.

For a check of the whole list, the MLA 9 works cited formatting guide covers spacing, the hanging indent and the heading.

Quick-reference table