How to cite a Wikipedia article in APA format

✔️ Answered on July 15, 2018 (updated on December 30, 2020) by Daniel Elias · 2 min read

There are two ways to cite a Wikipedia article in APA format.

Automatically cite a Wikipedia article in APA format

The easiest way is to use our citation generator below. Simply select the style you need to format your citation in, then paste the URL for the Wikipedia article into the search box and press search. We’ll find the details automatically and format them in the style you selected.

Manually cite a Wikipedia article in APA format

Alternatively you can cite a Wikipedia article manually. A Wikipedia article is essentially just a webpage, so you should cite it in the same way you would usually cite a webpage. For APA format this is as follows:

First, locate these details for the article: article title, published date, access date, article URL (web address). The article title can be found at the top of the article, and the publish date can be found right at the bottom and looks something like This page was last edited on 12 July 2018, at 13:50 (UTC). The access date is the date you took information from the article (usually today).

Then use this template, replacing the colored placeholders with the information you found on the page:

Wikipedia Contributors. (Published year, Published month and day). Article title. Retrieved Accessed month and day, Accessed year, from Article URL.

The final formatted citation should look like this:

Wikipedia Contributors. (2018, July 12). Marvel Comics. Retrieved July 15, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Comics