Wikipedia reporting: How the community verifies, fixes, and defends truth online

When you read a Wikipedia article, you're not just seeing facts—you're seeing the result of Wikipedia reporting, the ongoing process of verifying, correcting, and defending information through open collaboration. Also known as community-based fact-checking, it’s how millions of volunteers keep the world’s largest encyclopedia accurate, even when lies spread faster than truth. Unlike news sites that publish once and move on, Wikipedia reporting never stops. Every edit, every discussion, every rollback is part of a living system designed to catch errors before they stick.

This system relies on three key things: reliable sources, trusted references like peer-reviewed journals, official reports, and major media outlets that Wikipedia editors must cite, fact-checking tools, like the diff viewer and edit history that let anyone trace changes and spot vandalism, and Wikipedia policies, the community-written rules that demand neutrality, transparency, and accountability from every editor. These aren’t suggestions—they’re enforced. If you edit a page about a political candidate without citing official results, your edit gets reverted. If you try to push a biased narrative using blog posts as sources, you’ll be warned—or blocked. This is how Wikipedia stays trustworthy when other sites don’t.

Wikipedia reporting also means defending the encyclopedia. When governments try to censor pages, when corporations pressure editors to delete negative info, or when AI generates fake citations to slip into articles, volunteers step in. Tools like TemplateWizard help new editors avoid mistakes. Bots filter out spam before it ever shows up. The Signpost reports on outages and crises in real time. Librarians and educators bring research skills to the table. And every time someone checks a citation, reviews a diff, or joins an edit-a-thon to fix a content gap, they’re doing Wikipedia reporting. It’s not glamorous. It’s not paid. But it’s essential.

What you’ll find below is a collection of real stories and practical guides from inside this system. You’ll learn how to spot unreliable sources, how edits get approved, how bots stop spam before you even see it, and why a stub article isn’t just incomplete—it’s a call to action. Whether you’re a student, a journalist, or just someone tired of fake news, this is your guide to how truth gets built, one edit at a time.